The Hollywood Brown Derby reservation alerts

A Hollywood institution, rebuilt at the park

The original Brown Derby opened on Hollywood Boulevard in 1929 and spent decades as the place the film industry ate lunch. Disney's version copies the dark wood, the white tablecloths and the hundreds of star caricatures that covered the walls of the real thing.

It is the only signature-dining restaurant inside Hollywood Studios, which concentrates a lot of demand into one dining room.

The Cobb salad and the grapefruit cake

The Cobb salad was invented at the original Brown Derby, and the version here is still prepared and tossed tableside. The grapefruit cake is the other order people plan around — a light layer cake with cream cheese frosting that has been on the menu in some form since the 1930s.

Between those two dishes and the setting, a lot of guests treat lunch here as part of the day rather than a break from it.

Why Brown Derby tables go so quickly

Signature dining, a single location, and a Fantasmic! dining package that consumes a share of the seating all push against the same limited inventory. Searches for Brown Derby reservations have climbed sharply over the past year, and prime dinner windows are usually gone within minutes of the booking window opening.

Catching a Brown Derby cancellation

Plans change constantly, and tables reappear at all hours — including same-day. The difficulty is that they rarely last long enough for anyone refreshing the page by hand to catch them.

Park Drop watches The Hollywood Brown Derby around the clock. Set an alert above and we will email and text you the second a table drops, and knowing when do Disney World dining reservations open? helps you plan the first attempt too.