Nice pics!
Curious ‘when’ in the season you had your reservation.
I agree with your assessment it was a mess as to their staging from start to finish. Their crowd control to enter the restaurant & seating protocol were glaringly very ineffective when we were there, pre Columbus Day last year.
Considering what we’ve experienced dining at Monsters in the past, the food was far better than expected.
I wish they offered a few different ‘roles’, but the scare actors were awesome, their pacing was decidedly not. that I attribute to a fail by the handlers & management. It’s great to have more time & interaction at a character meal when at the Universal parks. Unfortunately, they didn’t take into account guests wanted to both meet all the scareactors & take advantage of the early release to the houses. IMO they need to start the meal earlier or reduce the number of filler scareactors.
Puzzling that they didn’t seem to be following any sort of pattern when we were there...often skipping tables entirely or being summoned to another section before completing the section they were visiting.
Hope they will continue to evolve this offering and hit it out of the park this year.
Thank you!
We were there on 10/28. It was strange to me how many TMs seemed confused by so many parts of the process since it was so late in the season. We got to the side entrance early since we had the 5 pm seating and were planning to take advantage of the early house entry. When we got there, I said that we were there for the scareactor dining and that I knew that we were early. The TM at the entrance told me in no uncertain terms that I was in the wrong place and told me to try to the Blue Man Group ticket window.
Since I knew we were in the right place, we hung out in the area, with the TM awkwardly staring at us like we were gonna stage a hostile takeover. Eventually another group showed up and he called another employee who was able to check us in and walked us over to the restaurant a few minutes after 4:30.
Like you said, the check-in process at the restaurant was very ineffective. They were checking everyone in regardless of seating time and attempting to sort and color code people but they didn't have enough colors for all the time slots which seemed to cause chaos. There was a very nice TM at the door entertaining us while we were waiting and he asked people to raise their hands if we wanted to try to go to Stranger Things early. A handful of groups raised their hands and he told us we'd have to meet a manager at the entrance at 5:30 to beat the holding areas. We asked if we could come back to the meal after the house since that was only a half-hour window to eat and see the actors. He called another employee over to ask and he said yes but only to meet the actors, not to eat. Sounded strange but ok.
By the time we got food and sat, we had only met one scaractor and eaten a few bites of food before it was 5:30. We told one of the servers (hostesses? not sure what to call them lol) in the area what we were doing and asked if it would be possible to just return to our same table and food since it seemed so wasteful to barely eat anything and were told no. I get why it's not an option to some extent but all the tables were never full either so it seemed like that would've been a less complicated option. A manager came to walk us across to Stranger Things who was nice but when we asked the process for coming back after going through the house, he looked at us and told us that wasn't an option. When we said we had been told it was by another TM, he said they'd make an exception.
At the entrance of the house, they told the manager he walked us across too soon but we could stand there and wait if we promised not to wander.
Surprise- we got back to the restaurant entrance and they had no idea what to do with us. The manager who just walked us across the street apparently fell into a black hole and couldn't be located. 3 TMs and a new manager later and me telling my spiel of what happened 900 times, finally we were just sent back into the restaurant as though we were being seated for the first time.
So we got new plates of food, sat at a new table and started over. In the end, we enjoyed the food and had fun interacting with the characters. There was one we never did get to see because they didn't come to our table and we got tired of waiting.
I agree- I hope they evolve it because we really did have a good time in the end but it wasn't worth all the chaos. I don't remember what time the last seating was but I think if we were gonna do it again, we'd do maybe the latest seating and do stay and scream and hit one or two houses before starting our meal and then maybe it wouldn't be so chaotic?