Ristorante di Cannaletto Review
Ristorante di Cannaletto is a table service restaurant at Tokyo DisneySea. In this review, we’ll share food photos and a look inside this restaurant, plus thoughts on whether it’s worth your limited time in Japan. For starters, this is an Italian restaurant in Mediterranean Harbor with outdoor patio seating overlooking the Venetian waterway canal and gondolas.
Pause a moment to let this sink in: while you are in a theme park in Tokyo, Japan, you can have pizza at an Italian restaurant as you watch Venetian gondolas float through the waterway pictured above. Just look at that view! At this point, is this review even necessary? Ristorante di Cannaletto could be serving Kibbles ‘n Bits drenched in mayonnaise, maple syrup, and dusted with Pixy Stix, and it would probably still be worthwhile to eat there.
Fortunately, the actual menu is nothing like what I just described. Rather, it’s one of the best restaurants at Tokyo DisneySea and Tokyo Disneyland, offering a solid variety of Italian food with an emphasis on excellent pizzas. It’s also the only restaurant in Tokyo DisneySea that offers a menu with vegetarian items. Yes, really. Variety, excellent food, and great ambiance? Okay, now you can probably stop reading…
For our meal here, we went to the restaurant first thing in the morning to try for Priority Seating, Tokyo Disney Resort’s version of Advance Dining Reservations. Fortunately, it was a slow day, and the restaurant had some availability.
As we learned on our subsequent visit to Tokyo Disney Resort, during which we tried on 3 different days to get Priority Seating times here without success, it’s a very popular restaurant.
We highly recommend trying for Priority Seating after you do the morning attraction dash (or, make reservations in advance if you’re staying on-site). There is standby seating available, as well, but prepare for a wait in line if you go that route.
Ristorante di Cannaletto is gorgeous on the inside and outside. Most of the inside of the restaurant consists of a single, large room with high ceilings. While such an environment runs the risk of coming across as a ‘mess hall’ type setting, Ristorante di Cannaletto pulls it off very well.
There’s lots of art, tables spaced appropriately apart, and beautiful design-work on the ceiling. Booths and flowers further give the restaurant a sense of intimacy, allowing it to simultaneously feel grandiose and personal.
The front entrance, with the Venetian canal straight forward and slightly the left. While the restaurant is technically in Mediterranean Harbor, it’s right at the edge of American Waterfront, too.
Above is a view of the main dining room. As you can see, it’s expansive yet still has a ton of beauty and charm. Kudos to the design team.
The indoor areas are certainly beautiful, but regardless of the beauty, it’s tough to top sitting on the patio watching the gondolas pass.
Ristorante di Cannaletto has a standard a la carte menu and a seasonal prix fixe menu. On our visit, the options on the prix fixe menu looked good to me, and it was only ~$25 for a drink, appetizer, entree, and dessert (and no tipping).
The Seafood Pizza on the regular menu also looked good, so Sarah and I opted to get one prix fixe order and one a la carte order of the seafood pizza, and split everything.
The pizza kitchen and oven are part of an open-air show kitchen, so you can watch pizza being made.
The prix fixe meal also came with a Marinated Shrimp and Smoked Salmon with Carrot Mousse for an appetizer.
Excellent presentation, and a nice, flavorful appetizer to start.
I was really apprehensive about ordering a seafood pizza because I’ve made the mistake of ordering it at Italian restaurants in the states before, and it’s almost always a bust. Usually, either the seafood tastes fake/rubbery, the pizza is overcooked, or both.
In this case, the seafood was perfection. It had shrimp, crabmeat, octopus, baby scallops, black olives, pesto, and tomato sauce. The seafood tasted incredibly fresh and high quality, the flavors meshed perfectly, and the pizza was cooked to perfection. I figured this pizza would be mediocre at best, but it turned out to be one of the best things we ate on the entire trip. It was the true standout from the meal, and I’d highly, highly recommend it above anything else we tried–if you like seafood.
The Margherita pizza with mozzarella, basil, and tomato sauce was also excellent. It was smaller in size, but between it and the Seafood Pizza, we had plenty of food.
One of our friends ordered the Linguine with Beef Ragu. I believe she liked it, but I don’t really recall.
Cassata with fresh berries was the prix fix dessert. Again, good presentation, but nothing earth-shattering here. It was a refreshing dessert that tasted good, but that’s about it.
As with all restaurants at Tokyo DisneySea, alcohol is available on the menu, so you can order a nice Italian beer with your meal.
Like virtually everything at Tokyo DisneySea, this restaurant is packed with beauty and details, but not to the point where it’s overwhelming or visually cluttered. Just like the theme park version of a (beautiful) onion, with many layers to peel off…or something like that.
Overall, we cannot recommend Ristorante di Cannaletto highly enough. While it’s clearly a well-rounded Italian restaurant, it looked to us (based on what we saw others ordering) like pizza was the star of the show. As far as price goes, it was pretty comparable to a meal at Via Napoli at Walt Disney World, but cheaper. In total, it cost just over $50 for the two of us, and we had two pizzas, drinks, an appetizer, and a dessert. Granted, the appetizer and the dessert weren’t necessary what we would have ordered with the full menu in front of us, but even had we ordered everything we wanted entirely a la carte, we still would have been under $70 for the meal. Considering the quality of the food, we think that’s very reasonable. Although we like Epcot’s Via Napoli, I much preferred Cannaletto, and we definitely plan on eating there the next time we visit Tokyo DisneySea…if we can get Priority Seating! The ambiance alone was worth the price of the meal, as it truly felt like a lunch at an Italian restaurant by a canal in Venice. So basically, just spend ~$70 to eat here and skip that trip to Venice. Save thousands! 😉
If you’re thinking of visiting Japan for the first time and are overwhelmed with planning, definitely check out our Tokyo Disney Resort Planning Guide. It covers much more than the parks, from getting there to WiFi to currency and much, much more. For more photos and an idea of what we did day-by-day during our first visit, read our Tokyo Disney Resort Trip Report.
Your Thoughts…
Have you dined at Ristorante di Cannaletto? What did you think of it? Any recommendations for things to order? Questions about this Tokyo Disney Resort restaurant? Hearing feedback about your experiences is both interesting to us and helpful to other readers, so please share your thoughts below in the comments!
Hi Tom, thank you for your fabulous website – it’s invaluable for our trip to Tokyo Disneyland next month! From reading your review I think we’ll book the Ristorante di Canelletto. We’re staying in a Disney hotel so the booking opens 30 days in advance (tonight!) so fingers crossed I get a table. My question is can you request an outdoor table at time of booking or do you just have to take your chances on the day and arrive early?!
Thanks so much, Camilla (UK)
so it shows it is fully booked when I am there. does that mean I have no chance of getting in??
How do you get Priority Seating? Do you have to reserve or is it a first-come-first-serve sort of thing?
Here’s some info on it: http://www.tokyodisneyresort.jp/en/help/tdl_priorityseating.html
I was there at the restaurant 2 years ago. We actually dined quite spontaneously at 4pm (yes!). It was very quiet and we sat by the river. A excellent way to take a break from those walking and running around the park.
It was one the the best experience on that day. Service and food was very good at a very reasonable price – my friend actually commented that it was a steal.
Will dine there again, but knowing how busy this restaurant can be during normal hours, we will go again at a slow-time.
I enjoy reading your review.
WOW! This restaurant looks phenomenal – (well like everything inTDS) – honestly the ambience looks incredible (maybe the best in any Disney theme park?) and the food looks fantastic!
I have to say it’s killing me that I can’t go to Tokyo anytime in the near future… between restaurants like this and Magellans it seems like nit only is Tokyo Disney the best resort for attractions but maybe don’t as well!
Hopefully when I graduate in a couple of years I can swing a trip to Tokyo!
Go for it. The hype is real! I can’t wait to go back.
This doesn’t touch Magellan’s in terms of ambiance, but it is a very solid restaurant. Tokyo DisneySea is just an amazing theme park. Unlike any other Disney park anywhere. The only park even remotely as ambitious was probably EPCOT Center when it first opened.
Do you think we will ever see a new park that is as well done as the Original Epcot or Tokyo Disney Sea again?
Based on the plans, it looks like Shanghai is really ambitious in design. It’s just a question of whether it will have the substance. Also, it’s not really a unique concept, just a deviation on the Disneyland model.
The other question there is whether the guests will ruin the experience. Mainland China might be a big “hurdle” for Disney.