I think the big problem is that how do you say the place is worthy for a $15 lunch or a $50 dinner. I really, really hope they don't go the route of most restaurants, and make the lunch as overpriced as the dinner. (Disney has priced me out of a lot of dining, there's select restaurants we enjoy - but a lot of them I just don't appreciate paying $45 for a mediocre food just so I can meet 4 characters.I also don't want to pay $50 just to go into this restaurant.)
It's not that hard to do. This goes back 10 years from the last time I was there, and probably close to 25 years from the first, but there was a little old fishing camp in the keys called Rainbow Bend just north of Marathon. It's kind of a dumpy place and attached to the hotel is kind of a dumpy restaurant on the second floor of registration with some wonderful windows and an indoor/outdoor deck seating arrangement. At breakfast it served very... well typically crappy... fishing camp food for cheap. Runny eggs, weak coffee, crunchy pancakes and so on. But at dinner...
Well at dinner, people used to be limo'd from Miami to come eat there. Reservations were taken months in advance. The chef was a superb older man and his son who had retired from the restaurant business in NYC and wanted to do his dinner service only by where he chose to semi-retire. It was the best French Onion Soup, perfect steaks, a to die for Chateaubriand for two... the food was amazing. And at night, with the sun setting in the background or even the stars over the Florida Bay, those windows in that dumpy restaurant and that amazing deck made for an incredible place to enjoy the food. Sure you were sitting on mismatched chairs and the lines covered the crappiest old tables you can imagine, but it didn't matter because it was amazing.
I took my wife there when we got engaged, the restaurant, not the fishing camp. It was my last time there since we have since left FL and never been back to the Keys, and by then the father had retired, the son ran the place, and the shine had worn off and stopped many people from coming so far just to eat, but the locals and the hotel maître d's still filled the place telling people where to get the best dinner around. It was still amazing and I remembered why my Dad and I used to visit Rainbow Bend almost annually when I was in h.s. and college, but we went there because we could eat at that restaurant twice every trip.
So how does Disney do something similar with one venue? With food and by tweaking the atmosphere. Lunch can be more or less how it is. But come dinner, that menu needs to step up massively and the environment needs to change. Assigned seating, no wandering, no flash photography, fewer people so the volume drops. Smaller tables so it doesn't feel like communal feeding. Appropriate costumes for staff and actual ordering at tables, not computers on the way in. They can do it, just like Rainbow Bend made it happen, but they have to want to make that dinner worth $50 and not just stand on the building itself.
