Is This New Hidden Disneyland Outdoor Restaurant & Bar Worth Your Time?
Disneyland’s restaurant offerings are constantly evolving. Since the parks reopened it feels like there has been a new focus on additional restaurants and food items.
Many of the new locations coming out of this focus will be found in the new Downtown Disney where several new restaurants are opening at some point in 2024 – there have been so many Downtown Disney announcements that we made an entire article just tracking them in here. There have also been new versions of restaurants added last year with the opening of San Fransokyo Square and Tiana's Palace. That said, there are a couple of new restaurants that have just opened at Disneyland inside the hotels.
Today we’ll dive into our review of a new outdoor bar and restaurant. At Mickey Visit, we are at Disneyland weekly and always updating our coverage of the parks. I’ve now been to this restaurant a couple of times since the location opened and ordered a variety of menu items. The restaurant wins on ambiance and crowd level. There are menu items to skip and ones that are a must-try. Plus, we share why we were so pleased that this restaurant opened at all.
New Disneyland Palm Breeze Bar
Hidden beyond the Villas at the Disneyland Hotel Tower lobby and behind some obscure pool gates is the new Palm Breeze Bar. When this new Disney Vacation Club tower opened the restaurant wasn’t ready, but I made sure to come back to check it out a couple of times in recent months before sharing this review.
The restaurant is completely outdoors with high tables, low tables, and bar seats. There are heat lamps throughout. Even on a recent colder night, we were fine sitting near one of the heat lamps on high. The restaurant is on the first floor of the new tower between the Monorail pool and the new pool that was added along with the DVC tower. To access the restaurant you have to go all the way around through the lobby of the new hotel tower and out the sliding doors. You can’t take the obvious way when coming from the lobby which would be from around Goofy’s Kitchen and in.
Getting to this restaurant requires knowledge of the pathway that is available to non-hotel guests. The Disneyland Hotel is circled with key card-protected gates and then there's another gate to access the pool area where the lounge is located. You have to follow the specific path from the Downtown Disney hotel entrance and then over to the tower lobby to get in without a card. These restrictions limit the amount of people at the location. Here's the map of that walk from Downtown Disney:
My first visit to the restaurant was at lunchtime and it was empty. There were two tables. My table and another table where the general manager of the Disneyland Hotel was eating with another Cast Member. More recently on a Friday night, it was much more full but we were still able to walk up at 6:30 pm with no wait.
There are a couple of other restaurants like this at the Disneyland Resort that are marketed as a “bar” but also have great wide-ranging menus. Others include Trader Sam’s which is also at the Disneyland Hotel (though there is an indoor section also) and our favorite the Craftsman Bar which is located at the Grand Californian. The Craftsman Bar remains our best “secret” spot for a quick good meal and is on our best Disneyland restaurants list. With just two of us or when I am on my own, I love sitting at the actual bar there.
The Palm Breeze Bar is quickly becoming another secret spot for us – in fact, it just made it on our top 20 secret Disneyland spots list. With a bigger group on that recent Saturday, we weren’t able to get into the Craftsman Bar so we headed across from the Grand Californian to try the Palm Breeze with no issue.
Themed after Palm Springs, the restaurant is all big pops of color. The highlight for me is a wonderful mural at the bar end of the restaurant by the bar that captures some of our favorite Disneyland attractions.
Now, diving into the menu I’ll go by course.
Food at Palm Breeze Bar Disneyland
We tried the an appetizer that had the Avocado and Lime Hummus dip plate which features pita chips and vegetables to dip in hummus. The pita was a little bit too hardened for me. Good enough for a snack but not my favorite. Might skip it unless you, like us, need some greens. If I went back I would ask for double vegetables instead of the pita bread.
For the main meals, we’ve enjoyed a couple of different items. By far my favorite food items are the salads. I’ve had both the Southwest Salad and the Heirloom Beet Salad. The beet salad was fantastic. I added a side of salmon which was perfectly cooked.
Highly recommend the Beet Salad with the Heirloom! The Southwest Salad is also very good and something I've now had multiple times.
We also had the Palm Breeze Burger which is topped with sun-dried Tomato & Basil Pesto, Burrata, Arugula. We had it with delicious French Fries. The burger is $26. The Craftsman Bar has a comparably priced burger at $24.
We also ordered the Crab Salad Sandwich which came with fries. I would not recommend this one. We are seafood fans and this tasted more like a chicken salad or tuna salad. Nothing that special. It cost more than the other sandwiches so I would generally say not worth it.
We haven’t yet tried the pizza at the restaurant but it looked fine too. The pizzas are personal-sized and are roughly the size of a dinner plate. The pizza is good at the Craftsman Bar so I would bet it’s pretty good over here too.
For dessert, we tried both the beignets and the Molten Chocolate Cake. I wasn’t blown away by either of these. The Molten Chocolate Cake was the better of the two and good enough.
The beignets were very cakey and nowhere near as good as the beignets inside Disneyland at the Mint Julep Bar. Skip these beignets and those instead! The beignets came with cute Mickey Mouse head dipping sauces which was a fun touch, but the chocolate syrup tasted like it came out of a bottle. There’s a big opportunity for a massive improvement of this dessert.
The Molten Chocolate Cake is also suffering from a difficult comparison because the lava cake at the Hearthstone Bar just WOWED me recently with an incredible cake and ice cream. That cake was not a standard Disneyland dessert and it stuck out. I called it one of the best Disneyland desserts. I was hoping it would be the same here. Not so. A fine dessert, but not the best.
The main courses we tried were largely great but the dessert and Crab Sandwich left us desiring something different. Come for the serenity and stay for the fine entrees. Whether the restaurant would make our best overall Disneyland restaurants list is up for debate, but generally, for our need for an escape from crowds and a nice dinner for four, this worked perfectly.
Is Palm Breeze Bar Good Disneyland?
One of our biggest comments about the new Disney Vacation Club Villa, when it opened, was that the Disneyland Hotel didn’t have enough dining to support the existing hotel rooms and that the additional towers would stretch the dining capacity even more. We are pleased that the Palm Breeze Bar is open for this reason. We would still love to see a return of a restaurant to the space where Steakhouse 55 was located. For the nightly pricing at the Disneyland Hotel, it is still in need of an upscale signature dining location on the level of Napa Rose at the Grand Californian.
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