If you are looking for a quick service meal over at Disney’s Contemporary Resort, you can stop in at Contempo Café. They serve breakfast, lunch, and dinner and have an impressive dessert cabinet if you just want something sweet. Here in our Contempo Café review, we’ll tell you about our experience eating breakfast and dinner at this Disney World restaurant. The review will include our thoughts on the food and décor, along with pictures of everything.
If you plan on eating breakfast at Contempo Café, we don’t recommend using your Disney Dining Plan quick service credits. As you can see on the Contempo Café breakfast menu there are not many expensive items. There are no items that would cover the value of what that quick service credit is worth. Save your credit for another meal and pay out of pocket for breakfast here. When it comes to dinner at Contempo Café, the story isn’t much different. The Contempo Café dinner menu doesn’t have an entrée on it that comes close to recouping the value of your quick service credit. Again, you should pay out of pocket for dinner here.
If you have the Tables in Wonderland card, it will do you no good here. They don’t take it, like most counter service locations at Disney World.
The Contempo Café Décor Has a Generic Food Court Look
As you walk into Contempo Café, you will probably be struck by the lack of theming. You won’t find much of anything that says what the restaurant is about. In fact, there isn’t anything outside of the Mickey Mouse themed chairs that say you are at Disney World. It really is going for the general food court vibe.
Now, that’s not to say there aren’t some things that may give it a distinctly Disney feel around the restaurant. As you can see in the picture above, Contempo Café doesn’t have a roof over itself so that you can see all around Disney’s Contemporary Resort. By the way, if you are interested in the resort, we have a complete Contemporary Resort review on the blog. The benefit of this is that you do pick up some ancillary Disney feel because you can see the monorail passing through the resort, and the Mary Blair mural stands tall over the dining area. These items help give you a sense of Disney, but they are more characteristics of the resort, not so much the restaurant.
Contempo Café would hardly be the first quick service restaurant with a lack of great theming, but some have a better set up. We’re big fans of the nearby Roaring Fork, and even Gasparilla Island Grill from a décor feel.
With a lack of any real theme, the food needs to be great, but don’t we always want that? Let’s get into the meals we had as part of our Contempo Café review.
The Dinner and Desserts at Contempo Café Blew Us Away; Breakfast Was Good, but Basic
When a Disney World restaurant doesn’t have a great theme, it puts me on high alert for the quality of the food. It can be a harbinger of bad things to come. It isn’t the first time this has happened, but I have been proven wrong on other occasions. Fortunately, my first impressions of Contempo Café were wrong!
In terms of value for your money, you’ll find some excellent choices. You can find quality dinner entrees for $10-12, which are good sized portions. You’ll find similar value at breakfast with entrees in the $8 range, but again with a good-sized portion.
The menu at Contempo Café includes a diverse set of options. Breakfast features items that you would consider fairly basic Disney fare, but there are some other more interesting options. The dinner menu is where the diversity of possibilities shines. You’ll find pizzas, burgers, salads, and other specialty items that give you lots to choose between.
As we said at the beginning of this post, we had both breakfast and dinner during our stay. We’ll cover both of these meals here in our Contempo Café review.
Breakfast at Contempo Café
As we alluded to already, there is plenty of standard Disney World breakfast fare at Contempo Café. Mickey Waffles, pancakes, and more can be found here. That doesn’t make the restaurant bad, far from it. It just may not be overly inspired or unique to Contempo Café.
To start our Contempo Café breakfast, Anna ordered the Mickey-shaped Waffle that you see above. We should note that this is the adult waffle, not the waffle on the kid’s menu. It was cooked well and not too crispy, which can happen from time to time. The banana topping was tasty and not overly sweet. I will say the bacon was a bit of a mess, but if that is the biggest problem, then we’re doing well with this entrée.
I ordered the pancakes for my breakfast. It’s another item that I would say is standard breakfast fare, but at the same time, it’s execution has to be good. Fortunately, it was. The pancakes at Contempo Café were light and fluffy and had an excellent taste.
Elsa continued her voracious appetite and ordered from the adult menu. She was probably the most adventurous of us all, ordering the Grilled Breakfast Sandwich. This sandwich features ham, eggs, and a three-cheese blend stuffed between two slices of griddled toasted bread. The cheese was wonderfully gooey with a great flavor. It was the best thing anyone ordered for breakfast, in my opinion. Anna would not agree. The eggs were surprisingly good because they struck me as freshly made, instead of some of the hard-crusty ones we sometimes find at Disney World. Elsa agreed and devoured the entire sandwich, saving just a couple of bites for me. This is a substantial portion if you are looking for a heartier breakfast.
Lastly, Carla went with the standard gluten free Mickey Waffles. She found them well cooked and tasty. They were an excellent way to start the day for her, if not a little boring. But when you are eating gluten free, sometimes your options are lacking.
Alright, that’s the breakfast portion of our Contempo Café review. It’s solid breakfast food, with one big standout. You won’t find a ton of inventive things to eat, though.
Dinner at Contempo Café
When it comes to dinner at Contempo Café, we all came in with a big appetite. We had just flown in, and it was late, so it was time to eat a hearty meal. For a quick service restaurant, I think we came to the right place.
We’ll start with Carla’s meal. She ordered the Italian Beef Sub, which you can tell from the picture above wasn’t served as a sub. That’s because she ordered it on gluten free bread. That said, the Italian beef was fantastic. The meat was well seasoned, and the mozzarella added a great flavor. It lacked the Au Jus that usually comes with it (another gluten free modification), and I think that would have put this sandwich over the top. Whenever we go back to Contempo Café, I’ll probably get this in a real sub-style. In any case, it was still excellent and something we’d get again.
For my dinner, I ordered the Seared Chicken Dinner. This is seared chicken, paired with the chef’s specialty rice, cilantro-lime vinaigrette, and seasonal vegetables. I’ll start with the bad, which was the amount of butter on the green beans. Man, there was a lot of butter, but they were cooked just like I like them, with a little bit crispness to them. Other than that, I loved the Seared Chicken Dinner. The chicken had a great seasoning on it. When you combined it with the cilantro-line vinaigrette and the pico de gallo it was fantastic. The flavors all worked together wonderfully. The rice itself was also very good, but it isn’t what makes the dish.
Elsa ordered the kid’s Grilled Shrimp Plate. As with all shrimp, she devoured it but lamented the fact that it only came with five shrimp, which is a much more generous portion than what she got at Grand Floridian Café. The shrimp were cooked well and not rubbery, but the green beans were very buttery, like mine. However, that did not bother Elsa. The rice was a very bland non-descript white rice that Elsa didn’t like.
Anna went with the kid’s Cheeseburger for her dinner at Contempo Café. Not surprisingly, it was not good. Don’t get me wrong, Anna liked it, but if you have any type of refined pallet for hamburgers, you will not like this. The meat is the standard Disney World beef patty, which was dry, overcooked, and just blah. That didn’t prevent Anna from enjoying it through.
That was everything we had for our Contempo Café dinner; however, we all were salivating at the desserts we saw. So, we decided that we would each get something for a fun treat to finish off our meal. We’ll talk about each of them below.
Contempo Café Desserts
We’ll start with the best dessert that we had, which just happens to be what I picked. That would be the peanut butter pie. This was amazing! We’ve read great reviews elsewhere about it but didn’t think it could be THAT good. Well, it was! Believe the hype. Inside the exterior crust is a filling of peanut butter cream cheese and a bottom layer of vanilla cream that was unbelievable. It’s topped with a chocolate ganache drizzle that pairs wonderfully with the peanut butter. Anytime I am at the Contemporary Resort, I will stop by for this if I’m hungry.
Next up, Elsa ordered the cookies and cream cupcake. This was a bit of a disappointment. The white chocolate monorail on the top is fun, but the vanilla cake base was very dry. Couple that with a cookies and cream buttercream icing that was too sweet, and we didn’t finish this. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t terrible, but there are better desserts here. There is a layer of Oreo cream inside the cupcake base, but it wasn’t enough to cut the dryness of the cupcake.
Sticking with Carla’s gluten free dining need, she ordered the flourless chocolate cake. Carla thought the cake was excellent. It was moist and fudgy. She even noted that the chocolate was creamy and not gritty. If you need a gluten free dessert at Contempo Café, this is something she recommends.
Anna ordered from the Arendelle Aqua Cake, which is a special series of desserts that Disney World had for the Arendelle aqua promotion. This was another dessert disappointment, as the cake on the inside of it was very dry. The dessert was also not like other pictures we have seen of it. Not sure if they were having issues in the kitchen or what the deal was, but it wasn’t quite right. That said, the interior cake is vanilla, and there is a blueberry filling right in the middle of it that was tasty. However, we ultimately couldn’t get past the dry cake and didn’t finish this sweet treat.
Wrapping Up Our Contempo Café Review
When we look back on it, we found Contempo Café to be a smash hit of a quick service restaurant. If you need a fast meal while at Disney’s Contemporary Resort, we think you should not hesitate to stop by here.
Does it lack any real theming and not have a ton of personality? For sure. But when it comes to fast food at a reasonable price, you won’t find much better in all of Disney World. While breakfast isn’t overly unique, you will find several reliable options for dining. We readily admit that dinner and desserts are where the Contempo Café shines. You absolutely must get the peanut butter pie or any of the entrées that we had, which were excellent. We highly recommend you stop by and grab a bite here!
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