MerrinDonahue.com

We headed over to Downtown Disney today to eat lunch at T-Rex. We’ve been waiting for it to open for about a year now, and we were super-excited to check it out.

Let me start off by saying that we are NOT fans of Rainforest Cafe; we’ve never really liked the food, and the coolness factor wears off after the first visit. We kind of expected the same for T-Rex. There are positives and negatives for T-Rex, though, and overall it was a better experience than I thought it would be.

First of all, they do an EXCELLENT job of moving people through the queue and to a table (same procedure as Rainforest—you put your name in and then stand in line). At 12:30 on a Saturday, we waited maybe 20 minutes. Not too shabby. Once we were seated, however, we waited about 10 minutes for a server to appear. Then we waited some more for our drinks. Our appetizer never appeared….but our entrees finally did…a full 30 minutes after we ordered. We sent them back and re-requested our appetizer. In fairness, they DID comp our app, and I’m pretty sure we just had a bad server, but looking around at other tables, everybody seemed to be waiting a while for food. That said, everyone else’s servers seemed quite a bit more attentive than ours.

The food was actually (surprisingly) good. The portions are VERY generous, and the menu was extensive, and there were a whole lot of seafood selections (thanks in part, I’m sure, to the fact that Landry’s owns T-Rex).

The “experience” was totally fun. There are 4 themed dining areas: Fire, Ice, the Sequoia room, and a coral reef. Every 30 minutes there’s a “meteor shower”, complete with comets streaking across the ceiling and much roaring and bellowing from the dinosaurs and wooly mammoths. There isn’t a bad seat in the house for checking out all the dino action, either, and all the favorites are represented: the T-Rex, a triceratops, a stegosaurus, and my favorite, the pterodactyl. It’s HELLA noisy in the restaurant, too, so if you’re looking forward to having a conversation, this is not the place for you. Even at our 2-top, we had to practically yell across the table to hear one another. There’s a place outside for the kiddos to dig called the Paleo Zone, and that definitely kept a bunch of kids occupied. And, of course, there’s a gift shop. It’s Disney…what did you expect?
Of course we had to take advantage of our opportunity to ‘Build-A-Dino”. Build-A-Bear has turned Jurassic at T-Rex, and it was super fun. We learned from our fluffer (get your mind out of the gutter! I’m talking about the girl that fluffs up your Dino with stuffing!) that there are only two Build-A-Dinos in the world, this one and one in Kansas City. The staff here was absolutely WONDERFUL….even as busy as they were, they were all outstanding, and everything I expect Disney employees to be.

We’ll definitely head back over to T-Rex again….but I think that we’ll avoid the peak times. Maybe it’ll be a bit quieter….and maybe we’ll get a better server. This is a definite must for people with kids; every kid we saw was having a blast. We give TRex a solid 4 stars (out of 5).