Lotso Garden Café is a buffet restaurant in Tokyo Disney Resort’s Toy Story Hotel. The restaurant, residing on the lobby floor of the hotel, is only open to hotel guests for breakfast and dinner. Lotso’s has a capacity of 300 people with a theme reminiscent of Sunnyside Daycare, where our titular bear spent his time in Toy Story 3. In this post, we’ll review breakfast at Lotso Garden Café!

I did a double take while combing over the Tokyo Disney website description of Lotso’s. The phrase that caught my attention was “this restaurant draws its inspiration from Lotso, the lovable pink-and-white plush teddy bear”. I was second guessing everything I knew about the Toy Story universe. Lotso is the villain, right?? We didn’t walk into the restaurant expecting a Five Nights at Freddy’s situation but the bear’s sinister ways were glossed over in the name of cuteness.

In hindsight, Tokyo Disney and Japan opting for the cuteness makes sense. The resort that made Duffy a big deal would look at Lotso as a loveable, strawberry-scented bear. For those that wanted to eat breakfast or dinner while being deceived, this is bad news. To those that didn’t, Lotso Garden Café is a cute and colorful spot to have a good buffet meal!

As I mentioned, the restaurant is only available to those that stay in Toy Story Hotel. To be honest, we were never planning to dine here but it was included in our vacation package. If Toy Story Hotel gets past the point of its current popularity then the restaurant might open up to more guests. I don’t see that happening anytime soon though.

The inside of the restaurant is extremely colorful with murals of Lotso on the walls. There is a daycare setting to it all, with the bright plastic chairs and fairly plain tables. The furniture leaves something to be desired, as it looks like what you might find in the cheaper section of Ikea. The chairs were more comfortable than they looked though!

On the plus side, Lotso Garden Café is quite spacious. There’s room for 300 people in here along with a large buffet on one side and several beverage stations throughout. Our view might be tainted a little by going at 6:30 in the morning but the vibe was pretty relaxed with all of the space. That feeling was a little counter intuitive to the explosion of color going on.

There is a nice wall of windows facing Tokyo Bay on one side of the restaurant. That helped balance everything out. Watching the boats pass by on the Pacific while eating in a restaurant that was maybe half full was enough to have me really enjoy the setting.

Unfortunately, there is a little bit of a plastered on look to Lotso Garden Café. Some of the décor works well enough, including the rainbow overhead and the larger mural of Lotso at one end of the restaurant (seen below). In fact, I think all of the color in here is a nice touch. There were just a few inclusions that made this feel cheaper than it needed to be.

I do think kids and Toy Story fanatics will enjoy the atmosphere though. No, this isn’t the pinnacle of Tokyo Disney Resort’s themed design. It’s on the low side of that spectrum. But there’s enough here to make the ambience work and cover up the oversized cafeteria feeling.

Moving on to the food, the buffet took up about 4 large tables and there was a wide variety offered. Typically, Tokyo Disney Resort buffets have a time limit for guests to stay and eat. I haven’t seen one listed here but they are usually over an hour, which is plenty of time. Soft drinks, tea, coffee and juice were available at a few different beverage stations and included in the buffet price.

If the décor wasn’t cute enough, the food definitely did the job. All of the pastries were adorable and absolutely delicious. I was making a conscious effort to not overly stuff myself before 7 AM but it was tough to talk myself out of 4 of these pastries each! They were the highlight of the meal, specifically the Lotso filled bear, the Hamm pastry and anything strawberry flavored.

I generally enjoy Tokyo Disney buffets more than I do at Disney resorts stateside because of the variety. In this case, it was fun to try all of that variety and have unlimited sweets for breakfast! They never let me do that in actual daycare so I had to live out my dream.

There were plenty of savory items too, many of them outside the realm of our typical American breakfast. When in Rome, right? I liked everything offered to varying degrees. As usual in TDR, the fish dishes were better than beef. I also really enjoyed the noodles and dumplings. Eggs, sausages and a few other ‘normal to us’ breakfast foods were included. There were also these fried cinnamon dough pieces for breakfast dessert that they handed out separately from the buffet.

As a whole, we came away very impressed by the food. It may not be the creme de la creme of Tokyo Disney Resort, or even their buffets, but there were exciting options to try that were both savory and sweet! It may have helped that we came right at opening but everything tasted very fresh and stayed away from the dreaded lukewarm buffet food.

The food is especially good in relation to the price. Dinner is slightly more expensive but the breakfast comes in at 3,400 yen per adult. As of July 2024, that’s just under $23 per person. Of course, this isn’t a character dining meal but a buffet of this quality has a ton of value for that price! I’m sure many people end up at Lotso Garden Café as part of their vacation package too. That price might make the package seem like less of a good deal but if you focus on the food you’re actually getting then it’s an asset.

Considering the atmosphere, food and value, we came away impressed by Lotso Garden Café! We weren’t expecting much going in, as it felt like a throw-in to our stay. After experiencing it, I’d recommend it for breakfast to anyone staying at Toy Story Hotel if you can make an early reservation. The drawback of the lackluster pieces of furniture or decorations is offset by the views of the ocean and strong dining options. If we end up at Toy Story Hotel again, we’ll be back for another meal here!

Overall Rating – 8/10

Have you tried Lotso Garden Café? Let us know, along with any questions you might have, in the comments below. Planning a trip to Tokyo Disney Resort? Check out our planning guide to help you along the way. If you enjoy what you’re reading here on Wandering in Disney then please subscribe to the blog via email or WordPress and like our social media accounts. You can find all of those on the right side of this page. Thank you for reading, we really appreciate it!