Lunch at Adventure World: Three Restaurants to Choose From

Overview

A day at Adventure World runs long enough that you will eat inside the park, and the choice comes down to three very different rooms. Smile Kitchen, the large family restaurant in the Centre Dome, is the default: wide tables, a children's seating area and plates built around the park's animals. The food court in the Enjoy Dome is for when nobody wants the same thing — four counters share a single 88-seat hall, serving omelette rice (Kitchen), Wakayama ramen (Maam), curry (Marche) and udon made with local ingredients (SUM'S). Safari Restaurant Jambo, out in Safari World, is the grown-up option, with Kumano beef steaks and burgers at a different order of price.

Animal-shaped food still does the persuading with children, and it no longer depends on the pandas, which can no longer be seen in the park: Marche moulds its curries into pandas and giraffes, and every bowl of udon at SUM'S arrives with a panda fishcake on top. A fourth option the article does not cover is Dontei (丼亭), a Japanese table-service restaurant in the Centre Dome serving donburi of Kishu Wakaushi, a wagyu raised in Wakayama.

Reckon on roughly 1,000 to 1,500 yen for a food-court main, and from about 3,500 yen for the Kumano beef dishes at Jambo; the restaurants take cards. Individual visitors cannot book a table — the park takes meal reservations only through its group route, for schools, welfare groups and parties of 25 or more — so the original article's advice is sound: eat while a marine live show or animal action is on, when the dining rooms thin out. Menus and prices change, so check the park's official pages first.