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)We were seated in a rather empty restaurant, although I figured it was empty since it was so close to the first showing of Fantasmic! (8:30). Our server was a very nice older woman named Grace from Belgium and she is what you want from a waiter at WDW; fast, efficient and overly nice. I hadn't been to H&V since 2006 and hadn't had dinner here since 2003 so I was interested to see how things were. My first stop was the bread and salad bar. I grabbed a slice of sourdough bread that looked good and almost bypassed the salads before getting a nice spicy chicken pasta salad that was quite good.
The entree of the night and the dish to try is the pineapple chicken. Okay, I don't like pineapple but it looked good and it was amazing. One of the best chicken dishes I've had in years. It was so good I wanted to just go up and get another right away. The flavor was so rich..it was a real treat. There was another pasta dish that I got as well (I'm a sucker for pasta and rice), some mashed potatoes (usual Disney mashed potatoes with some skins in there).
For my second go around at the buffet, I got more pineapple chicken (duh) as well as a stop at the carving station. The turkey was the best turkey I've had in years; not dry at all and lots of flavor. If I hadn't filled up on chicken, I'd have gotten more of the turkey. The prime rib was average at best (it looked like it was towards the end of the prime rib so hardly a choice slice). The food was so good here that I really felt like I didn't save enough room to try everything I wanted.
For dessert, I had ice cream soft serve and mini-cheesecakes. I missed the hot fudge dispenser so I got back to the table with a boring helping of ice cream while everyone else had nice little sudaes.
After dinner we walked around Echo Lake and wanted to simply enjoy the evening. We got to the Sorcerer's Hat and wanted to show Marissa and Mike the new Sorcerer Mickey meet-n-greet along with the WallE stuff. We had to spend some time first in the Animation Gallery store with all of the fantastic art work. If I ever win the lottery, THIS is where I'm going first to splurge.
After seeing Walle & Sorcerer Mickey I suggested we do the Animation Academy once (we had all done it previously at least once). It's always fun and our character to draw was Pluto and let me tell you, this is the second time I've drawn Pluto here and I stink at Pluto. We got out, a good laugh from each of our excuses for a drawing and we went back to the Animation Gallery store to look around one more time and then leave. As we were going to leave, a cast member came up to us and pleaded (literally) with us to come to his animation academy session. He explained it was the last session of the day (it was about 10pm) and the Stuidios was basically closed but if we went there, we could spend some extra time in the park. The icing on the cake to get us to come was we were going to draw something no one has ever drawn in the Animation Academy before. We had no choice but to accept.
The Cast Member who dragged us to draw again, Timmy, was one of the most jovial and energetic cast members I've run into who wasn't a character or a manager or someone who has to be. He was genuinely happy with his job and he spent the first 10 minutes going around the room and asking where everyone was from and even had us all say hi to the people next to us. It really set the atmosphere for the drawing. He went on to explain he has been doing this for years and in April, is going to become an Imagineer with Disney and was clearly excited.
As he had mentioned before, we were going to draw something never done before. Usually you just draw a character smiling at you but tonight, Timmy was going to have us draw Winnie the Pooh looking up with a butter fly on his nose. I don't know if it was him or the atmosphere or perhaps I was struck with instant talent, but I did a pretty darn good job on it. Timmy was a lot of fun as well and made A LOT of Pooh puns and if you're in the parks before April rolls around, ask for his class!
After we walked through a fairly empty park on our way out and even looked through Mickey's of Hollywood. It was a great cap to our evening and its nights like this that make living in Orlando worth moving down here because I can truly appreciate having the parks so close and having the opportunity to have an evening like this.
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