page_title: Sci-Fi Dine-In Theater Restaurant
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Sci-Fi Dine-In Theater Restaurant / History
caption_attribution_description: English: The entrance to the '50s Prime Time Cafe
context_page_description: The Sci-Fi Dine-In Theater Restaurant is a theme restaurant at Disney's Hollywood Studios, one of the four main theme parks at Walt Disney World in Bay Lake, Florida, United States. Established in May 1991, the restaurant is modeled after a 1950s drive-in theater. Walt Disney Imagineering designed the booths to resemble convertibles of the period, and some servers act as carhops while wearing roller skates. While eating, guests watch a large projection screen displaying film clips from such 1950s and 1960s films as Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster, Plan 9 from Outer Space, and Attack of the 50 Foot Woman.
  The restaurant serves traditional cuisine of the United States. Popcorn functions as a complimentary hors d'oeuvre. Initially, the menu listed items with themed names, such as "Tossed in Space", "The Cheesecake that Ate New York", and "Attack of the Killer Club Sandwich", but these playful names were later altered so that they now describe the dishes in a more standard and straightforward manner.
  In 1991, the Sci-Fi Dine-In opened along with nineteen other new Walt Disney World attractions marking the complex's twentieth anniversary.
context_section_description: The Sci-Fi Dine-In, located on Commissary Lane across from Star Tours and adjacent to ABC Commissary, opened on April 20, 1991 as one of the twenty new attractions opened at Walt Disney World to mark the complex's twentieth anniversary. The restaurant was created with a strong emphasis on theme, in emulation of the 50's Prime Time Café, which had opened two years prior. Disney hoped that the focus on theme would bring the Sci-Fi Dine-In the level of success that had been garnered by the 50's Prime Time Café. Within five weeks of opening, it was serving between 1,500 and 2,000 meals on a daily basis, just as the 50's Prime Time Café was doing. A year after opening, the Sci-Fi Dine-In had become the most popular restaurant in the park, serving more than 2,200 people per day at peak periods. Starting from its earliest days, the restaurant equipped its servers with point of sale mobile devices that relayed orders to a printer in the kitchen, which was considered at the time to be in keeping with the science fiction theme because the technology had been developed shortly prior.
  In 2003, there were twenty character meals offered at Walt Disney World, during which actors portraying various Disney characters would interact with guests while they ate at the parks' restaurants, and Disney was in the process of increasing the presence of costumed characters in the parks at the time. Nonetheless, Minnie Mouse character meals held at Hollywood & Vine were discontinued that year, and Robert Johnson of the Orlando Sentinel partially attributed this cancellation to competition from the Sci-Fi Dine-In, which he said "almost always has a line of customers waiting".
caption: The 50's Prime Time Café, a theme restaurant that opened two years before the Sci-Fi Dine-In. Its success led to an emphasis on theme during the design of the Sci-Fi Dine-In.
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