Disney employs something called rotation dining on its cruise ships, and it works like this.

Both the Disney Magic and the Disney Wonder have three main dining rooms, as well as an upscale adults-only restaurant, a casual buffet, and several fast food places. This lets you try a variety of dining experiences during your time on board, which is fun because the restaurants all have dramatically different moods.

When you first board the ship you'll find a dining schedule waiting in your stateroom which will tell you when you'll be eating where. On the Disney Wonder, which runs the 3- and 4-night itineraries, you'll eat at least once at all three of the main restaurants. On the Disney Magic, which runs the 7-day itineraries, you'll eat at each restaurant at least twice.

The restaurants include:
• Parrot Cay, a casual island-themed Caribbean restaurant.
• Animator's Palate, a real kid-pleaser, where the Disney animation on the walls (as well as the restaurant fixtures, dishes, and even the servers' costumes) transform from black-and-white to color in the course of the meal.
• Triton's on the Disney Wonder and Lumiere's on the Disney Magic, two elegant fine-dining restaurants themed around "The Little Mermaid" and "Beauty and the Beast."
• Palo, a stunningly sleek adults-only restaurant serving contemporary cuisine high on Deck 10.

The first three restaurants are automatically included in the dining rotation--that is, you'll automatically eat at least one evening meal in each of them. If you'd like to plan a parent's night out at Palo, you need to make a separate reservation for whatever night you choose as soon as possible after getting on board. Palo is much smaller than the other restaurants, and popular, so it fills up fast; show up at the restaurant in person on the afternoon you board the ship to assure you'll get the night and time you wish. Your kids can eat dinner with the children's programming group on your Palo night.

In terms of dining time, you can request either early seating, which means you eat dinner at 6 p.m. or late seating, which means you eat at 8:30, at the time you book your cruise. Early and late seating are only factors in the evening meal; lunch and breakfast are served open-seating style at a restaurant that is listed on your daily activity guide, or you can visit one of the buffets or fast food places any time you choose.

Families with young children often find they prefer the early seating. Otherwise it can be as late as 9 p.m. before you actually get your meal, which is often simply too late for young kids to wait to eat. The disadvantage of early seating is that if you're off the boat and on a shore excursion at one of the ports of call, sometimes you have to scramble to get back to the boat and cleaned up in time to make that 6 p.m. meal.

Incidentally, whether you choose early or late seating is not really a factor with entertainment on board. Guests who eat at 6 p.m. see the 8:30 p.m. show and those who eat at 8:30 see the evening show first, at 6 p.m.

It sounds confusing but it really isn't. The information you get once you're on board makes it very clear and most families enjoy the variety that dining rotation offers. One of the officers with DCL put it to me this way: "We figured that on a land vacation people wouldn't eat every night at the same restaurant, so why would they want to eat at the same place every night they're on a cruise?" Makes sense to me.

Please keep in mind that phone numbers, addresses, and prices are subject to change. Updated June 2005.