The food

You’ll have two options for meals at the Norway Pavilion. Neither of them is your usual Walt Disney World fare. This pavilion emphasizes authenticity everywhere, and that carries into the restaurants. The quick service location is Kringla Bakeri og Kafe. You don’t have to speak the language to know that baked goods are a point of emphasis here. The School Bread is the stuff of myth and legend. The restaurant also offers quick bites and light meals such as Norwegian charcuterie and ham and apple sandwiches. Many foodies swear by Traditional Kjøttkake, a meatball dish. If you’re eating here, grab the Viking Combo to have a little bit of everything.

The star of dining at the Norway Pavilion, however, is the table service offering. Akershus is the Disney’s savant’s answer to Cinderella’s Royal Table. While everyone loves eating inside Cinderella Castle, Akershus has just as many princesses available for Meet and Greets. It also has better food. It’s an (expensive) buffet with a combination of serving station and an ordering menu. The serving station features a brown cheese called Gjetost that is Lose Your Mind delicious. You can look at the menu options here. Whatever you want for dinner, I heartily recommend the Rice Cream dessert.

One final pro tip about Akershus: It’s an excellent breakfast choice. When you start your day here, you’ll look your best for the photographs, something that will NOT be true later in the day. We recently went there for lunch in the wake of a monsoon. The poor princesses didn’t want anybody touching them and ruining their costumes, but they had no choice. Meanwhile, our pictures looked like we’d just lost a bet on Splash Mountain. The point is that you’ll look better first thing in the morning. Plus, after you’ve finished eating, you are right beside Frozen Ever After. If you nail the timing on this, you’ll be at the front of the line when Epcot opens.

The character meeting

Are you familiar with Anna and Elsa? These are characters from an unheralded Disney movie called Frozen. It slipped through the cracks during the holiday season of 2013, earning a modest $1.27 billion worldwide. It was barely even the largest release of 2013 and the number one animated movie of all-time.

If you can’t tell I’m being sarcastic, I’m worried about you.

Frozen is the dominant force in Disney theme parks over the past five years. For a time, a theme park tourist couldn’t walk 10 feet in a Disney park without seeing an Anna or Elsa costume. Frozen was the unofficial sponsor of Halloween 2014. Even a few years down the road, its presence is still felt and will continue to matter as release approaches for Frozen 2. While it’s unlikely to have the same impact as Frozen, Let It Go is already an unquestioned staple in the Disney music library. Frozen has entered that special Disney pantheon reserved for true classics such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, The Lion King, Mary Poppins, and Beauty and the Beast.

At the Norway Pavilion, Disney faced a tough call. That wanted to honor the wishes of King Olav V while also capitalizing on the tremendous popularity of Frozen. While they haven’t disrupted any of the existing architecture and only altered one store dramatically, they did build an entirely new area in the wake of Frozen. The Royal Sommerhus is a specially designed meet and greet with the sisters who are the backbone of Frozen. Meeting Anna and Elsa is going to be a thing with the current generation of under-18 women for basically the rest of their lives. It’s a seminal event for them, and that fact alone guarantees that this character meeting spot will maintain appeal for many years to come.