Eating at Silver Dollar City

One thing that makes Silver Dollar City unique to most other Amusement/Theme Parks, is they allow you to bring in your own food and beverages, with exception of alcoholic beverages. 

Start by knowing your budget and appetite size.

You can easily eat all three meals on the park if your budget allows. As there are many options for each meal and snack. If you are only going for one day or have a large vacation budget this may be something you choose to do.

Otherwise decide which meals you would like to eat at the park or not, and which meals you would like to purchase at the park or if you would rather bring in your own food. 

Keep in mind Silver Season Pass Holders and up to 6 guests receive a 10 percent discount at Restaurants and Gold and Diamond Season Pass Holders and up to 6 guests receive a 20 percent on all food.

For my family we generally eat breakfast before heading to Silver Dollar City, but once in awhile we do choose to buy breakfast at Silver Dollar City. We rarely if ever bring our breakfast to the park. 

Breakfast choices at Gate Opening include Molly's Mill Buffet Restaurant, includes everything you could want in a down home country breakfast. Another bonus to Molly's Mill for people who have children under 4, children under 4 eat free. And children 4 - 11 eat at a pretty inexpensive price. So for large families with young children this can be a pretty affordable choice.

Or a smaller fast meal of pastries and coffee from three different locations at Gate Opening. After Park Opening there are more restaurants and more bakeries open. 

The three Bakery choices during the hour between gate opening and park opening are -

Eva and Delilah's - has the largest assortment of pastries, including Sausage Kolackys (a favorite of my children's) entire loaves of fresh baked breads. And a assortment of Silver Dollar City's coffee selections, hot cocoa etc.

The Apple Butter Shop - has Apple Turnovers, Apple Cider and Hot Coffee.

Sulivan's Mill - has a few pastries as well as cookies and a limited Starbucks Coffee selection of coffees. They sometimes also have fresh baked loaves of sourdough bread.

And for those extremely hot days, yes, Hannah's Ice Cream Parlor is also open at Gate Opening, 1 hour before Park Opening/Rope Drop. 

About 1 hour after Park Opening almost all snack stands and restaurants will be open.

We usually pack a lunch consisting of sandwiches, pickled salad and chips. We enjoy eating it upstairs at the Lumbercamp, or downstairs at Wagon Works or wherever is most convenient that day. 

Then we usually purchase snacks and dinner at the park as long as the park is open late while we are there. 

If we go during early closing season we choose usually to purchase lunch inside Silver Dollar City and eat dinner at our Condo or purchase it outside of Silver Dollar City. 

However, usually early closing times, has a Echo Holler show that starts at Park Closing. Only the things in the Echo Holler show are open at that time. 

So we usually do buy a snack in Echo Holler to tide us over till we leave the Park. There are 2 snack stands inside the Echo Holler amphitheater. They generally have hot dogs, hamburgers, Pretzels, popcorn and Funnel Cakes. Hot cocoa, coffee and soft drinks too.

We really enjoyed the Tasting Passes last year as well. They were a great deal with our season pass discount. With the Gold Season Pass discount, they were 25.79 after tax. The size of each item was the perfect amount of food for us. And really helped save money. Most meals on the Park are gigantic. And either have to be split or we end up throwing half of it away. The Tasting Pass servings were about 1/2 to 2/3s the size of the full price regular servings of the same items. So the Tasting Passes really helped with that because most were the perfect size for a meal for us and left enough room in our stomachs and budget to get snacks too.

One thing to keep in mind if you decide to purchase Dinner at Silver Dollar City, many of the restaurants close or run out of food about 2 hours before park closing (with exception of Echo Holler), 1 hour before park closing hardly any food choices will be open or have food left. So try to plan to eat at least 1 1/2 to two hours before park closing, the later it gets the less choices you will have available. This is the reason we do not eat dinner at Silver Dollar City during early closing days. We generally like to eat Dinner later than 5 pm, so by waiting till after 5pm there generally is almost nothing left to buy for dinner on the park, besides what's served in the Echo Holler snack stands. 

We like to go during times when Silver Dollar City stays open later. At least 9 or 10 pm. Again many restaurants either close up completely at 7 pm or start running out of popular items like Turkey Legs. So we try to buy Dinner around 6:30 and no later than 6:45 to avoid missing favorite foods, and even then it's sometimes too late and we have to settle for something else. We have Found Hatfield's generally closes earlier than every thing else.

To avoid long lines and crowds. Choose to either bring your own food, or eat at the restaurants at off peak times. I would not choose to eat at the restaurants between 11:30am and 1:00pm. Eat at the lunch style restaurants (meaning not breakfast), before 11:30am or after 2:00pm. We usually choose around 2:00pm, on those rare occasions we purchase lunch at Silver Dollar. The food is still fresh from the crazy lunch crowd, but avoiding the actual lunch crowd.

Because we have several kids, we also usually set all the kids at a table first and know exactly what they want, and only have my husband and I go through the line to order the food. Helps reduce the look of the line and keeps things running smoother for us.