Mama Melrose's Ristorante Italiano

In my many trips to Walt Disney World, I’ve had the opportunity to dine at a large percentage of the table service restaurants in the theme parks and resorts. Most, I’ve found, have been better than expected and definitely well above standard theme park fare. The glaring exception to this rule, and winner of the award for my worst dining experience anywhere at Walt Disney World in 16 years, is Mama Melrose’s.

General Information
Mama Melrose’s Ristorante Italiano is located at Disney-MGM Studios in the Backlot section of the park. The cuisine is Italian and the casual dress restaurant is more geared toward families than some others in the parks and hotels. Mama Melrose’s is open for lunch and dinner. This restaurant accepts the Disney Dining Plan and a meal costs one table service credit. If you are paying cash, the cost will be about $16-28 per person if you do not drink alcohol.

This restaurant can get busy, as can all the theme park restaurants. If you still want to dine here after reading my review I suggest calling 1-407-WDW-DINE to make reservations up to six months in advance of your visit. When we visited, they were taking walk-up patrons but it was pretty early in the evening.


Fantasmic! Dinner Package
If seeing the Fantasmic! evening time show is a high priority, you can purchase this special package and receive a ticket to be seated in a reserved section of the theater for the show. The three restaurants participating are Mama Melrose’s, Hollywood and Vine, and the Brown Derby. If you have the dining plan this package costs one table service credit per person, otherwise prices are pretty standard for theme park table service restaurants at about $20-30 a head. My mom and I used this plan on our visit, and it was nice not to have to report to the theater until 7:00. I would do the dinner package again but definitely not pick Mama Melrose’s as the restaurant of choice.

Atmosphere
The restaurant makes much of its charming, casual, and cozy atmosphere, but I did not find it as described. The walls are all wood with random pictures and pizza slices hung all over them, but the high ceilings and large rooms made me feel like I was eating in a barn. We were basically seated in the aisle between the front reservation desk and the kitchen, which meant servers were constantly bumping us. I actually can’t believe they even had a table where ours was placed. I had a lovely view of the mob of guests waiting for their reservation times in the front lobby.

This is a VERY noisy place, and we couldn’t seem to block out the table next to us at which the parents were allowing their four children to yell and play with knives. The whole thing made me very nervous, especially when one of the little boys started sucking on the knife. Yikes! Overall, this was perhaps the least relaxing atmosphere I’ve ever dined in at Disney, including counter service locations.

Food
As we were taking advantage of the Fantasmic! package, we had a limited menu. This included a flatbread, entrée, and dessert. We quickly learned that although the Disney Dining Plan allowed us each to get an appetizer, here at Mama Melrose’s we needed to share the flatbread appetizer even though we wanted to try two different kinds. They called this “family style”, which seems kind of silly with two people. Keep in mind at other Disney restaurants one of us would get the shrimp cocktail and the other the crab cakes on the same plan. I think you could have more of the same kind of flatbread once you ate all yours, you just couldn’t get two different kinds. This was kind of a weird system.

Anyway, we had the Four Cheese Flatbread and it was awful. There was very little cheese on so basically it tasted like a burnt, flat piece of bread with a small hunk of cheese in the center. There was virtually no seasoning. Yucky.

Trying to remain optimistic, we moved on to the main course. We both selected the Baked Chicken Parmesan over Spaghetti, as did pretty much everyone else in the restaurant. I went to the bathroom at this point and noticed a massive pileup of this dish sitting under a heat lamp. As expected, the dishes tasted like they had been sitting a while when we received them. While they weren’t cold, the breading on the chicken was kind of mushy and congealed. This dish was only slightly less bland than the flatbread. I actually have had similar chicken parmesan at the law school cafeteria for $5.50, so I was fairly disappointed.

Ok, moving on to dessert…my mom stuck with plain old Gelato, which was fine but is fairly tough to mess up. I had the Warm Chocolate Truffle Cake filled with chocolate ganache. It was ok, but fairly nondescript as desserts of that type go. The cake was not very moist at all. I had enjoyed some amazing desserts the previous two evenings at other Disney restaurants, so perhaps my expectations were too high. All in all, though, this was a fairly dismal meal.

Service
I am definitely not picky about service. As I used to be a waitress myself, I understand that sometimes you just have a bad day. In this case, however, our service was absolutely awful. Right from the beginning our server was clearly trying to rush us to order. She also kept calling us “honey” in an annoying and condescending way. After serving our first drink, she never came back to our table to ask if we wanted a refill. Finally, a very shady thing happened with our check. On the Disney Dining plan 15% gratuity is included with food, but you have to pay for your own bill and tip for alcohol. The amounts given when my mom saw the bill for alcohol and when the server brought it back to be signed were different. As it turned out, she had added an “automatic” 20% gratuity. After being informed this was the policy (for whatever reason) we didn’t feel like fighting over a few dollars, but the whole thing was VERY sketchy.

The poor service wasn’t limited to our server either. People setting down plates would not clear the old plates, until our table was full of empty dishes. We actually had to set some dishes on the empty table behind us to even have room to eat. No one was friendly or conversational, which was a huge contrast to the polite and pleasant wait staff we had the rest of the week. The pacing of the meal was ridiculously fast, with our meal arriving (probably from where it had been sitting on the heat lamp for ten minutes) only about three minutes after we received our appetizer.

Overall…
Dining at Mama Melrose’s was truly a disappointing experience. The staff was unpleasant, the food was bad, and the atmosphere was loud. If you are paying full price instead of using a dining credit, the whole meal will probably cost you about $100 for a family of four. There are many fine restaurants at the Walt Disney World theme parks and resorts (my favorites are listed below), so I strongly suggest you try a different one on your visit.

*Other Disney Restaurant Reviews...
Top Ten Places to Eat at Disney World
Victoria & Albert's
San Angel Inn
Le Cellier Steakhouse

Recommend this product? No

Kid Friendliness: Yes