“Everything good?” the server asked me. “Are you enjoying your baby dragon?”
By that point in the evening, I had already watched acts of noble falconry, sipped my Royal Knight cocktail and screamed campy screams in support of the Red & Yellow Knight, my champion for the evening. If anything, a bite of baby dragon just seemed like the next logical step at California’s only Medieval Times.
Going to Medieval Times as a grown-ass adult with no kids in tow takes a special kind of disposition; one I heartily embrace. To maximize the evening’s potential, I brought a friend who’s of a like mind about immersive entertainment (which is just a fancy way of saying we’re both obsessed with the theatrics and heightened reality of theme parks and escape rooms). When we walked in and a tunicked squire handed us our red-and-yellow crowns, indicating that we’d be seated in that knight’s section, we eagerly donned those pieces of cardboard.
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We were ready to see some jousting. We were ready to huzzah until we were hoarse. We were ready for Medieval Times.
The 70,000-square-foot Orange County arena, not far from Knott’s Berry Farm, was filled with more than 1,100 mostly enthusiastic revelers for my sold-out Saturday night show in February. The crowd sits in riser-style seating ringed around the dirt-floored main stage, making sure everyone gets a prime view of the action below. A king and queen preside over the two-hour experience, welcoming guests to the realm to watch horses perform challenging dressage maneuvers and knights compete in a joust. (Spoiler: There’s a villain amongst the nobles.)
Knights on horseback are lined up in the arena at Medieval Times Dinner & Tournament, Toronto.
UCG/Getty Images
Throughout the show, servers bring around a not-at-all medieval dinner that starts with tomato soup and garlic bread, followed by a roasted half-chicken with a large wedge of potato and some corn on the cob, finished with an eclair for dessert. There is no point in waiting for utensils: At Medieval Times, the meal is designed to be eaten with your hands, as the peasants did nearly a millennium ago.
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Fascinatingly, the company’s mythology is based on actual royalty from 11th-century Spain, the country where the knightly dinner-and-a-show concept first originated some 60-ish years ago. Today, Medieval Times operates nine locations in the U.S. and one in Toronto. Its Buena Park location, first opened in 1986, remains the only one in California, and was the second in the country after Orlando, Florida.
The Lady Falconer has a bird perched in her hand at Medieval Times in Atlanta, Dec. 16, 2018.
Roberto Machado Noa/LightRocket/Getty Images
Today, Medieval Times is experiencing — forgive me for this — a renaissance. TikTok has caught on to the kitsch appeal of the experience, inspiring viral videos of the shows and a flurry of experiential coverage in national media. In April 2025, Food & Wine claimed the dinner theater was “the best theme restaurant,” period.
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There, the story described, “science and nature conspire to produce consistent, uniform, replicable spectacle, five nights a week.” And the writer observed, “It is the closest one can get to the experience of eating at a Spirit Halloween, I think, by which I mean everything is chaotic and perfunctory in the most charming, human ways possible.”
William Elliot III, 35, assistant head knight and a former magician in Las Vegas, makes a grand entrance as the Red Knight along with fellow knights during a show at Medieval Times in Buena Park, Calif., on Friday, June 28, 2013.
Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images
In August 2025, PureWow described the show as “currently the hottest destination in town.”
It’s a new development. Medieval Times has been something of a pop culture punch line throughout most of its 43-year lifespan. In the darkly comedic 1996 film “The Cable Guy,” Jim Carrey’s eponymous character is painfully sincere — and more than a little unhinged — about his passion for the place. That Jean Smart’s character in 2004’s “Garden State” is dating a Medieval Times knight is evidence that she doesn’t entirely have her life together.
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As recently as 2020, “Saturday Night Live” lampooned overzealous Medieval Times fans when Adam Driver appeared in a sketch in a “costume he brought from home,” hell-bent on exacting revenge on the “false king” of the show.
“He’s not wrong: $110 for chicken and potatoes is pretty tyrannical,” Thrillist wrote at the time. For the record, my ticket cost just under $79, but I declined various experience upgrades, like the “Queen’s Royalty Upgrade.” For an additional $30, it gets you priority seating, souvenir banners to wave, a slice of cake, a framed photo and “the best seats in the house.”
Maybe we lampoon it so much because we have to kill all our darlings, and the easiest ones to kill are the campiest ones. After all, paying to watch people parading around an arena pretending to kill each other with medieval-inspired swordsmanship is pretty low-hanging fruit as far as mockery goes.
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Knights jousting at Medieval Times Dinner & Tournament in Toronto.
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This is not to ding the Medieval Times performers at all — throughout the show, every cast member gave a standout performance, despite having to deliver lines and choreography that felt more than a little heavy-handed. And while the fighting may be fake, it comes with real risks. According to NPR, workers say that “knights perform dangerous stunts that require them to fight with real titanium weapons and throw themselves off horses at 25 mph for the performance.”
A female employee uses a tablet device to make sales at the Medieval Times Dinner & Tournament in Toronto, Dec. 24, 2023.
Roberto Machado Noa/LightRocket /Getty Images
Beyond the snark, Medieval Times can be hard to cheer for as a business, too. In recent years, the company has been embroiled in bitter labor disputes at some locations, including Buena Park. In 2022, employees unionized at that location after a monthslong battle to do so. “The company really used the time to sow the seeds of discord, create a divide within the bargaining unit, and so based off the way things were going and the people we were talking to, even though we started with a super majority of the bargaining unit, there was considerable attrition or at least so it seemed throughout the process,” union organizer and employee Erin Zapcic told NPR at the time.
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While that was happening, Medieval Times corporate brought suit against the workers’ union, claiming trademark infringement by union members using the company name and logo in publicizing the negotiation struggle. The suit was dismissed in October 2023. In 2025, the company was found to have broken the law many times in its fight against unionization.
A knight attacking another with an axe at Medieval Times Dinner & Tournament in Toronto.
Roberto Machado Noa/UCG /Getty Images
In 2023, Buena Park employees went on a strike when negotiations stalled, “calling for increased wages, better workplace conditions and less of what multiple cast members believe to be hostile responses from management,” the Los Angeles Times reported at the time. The strike lasted for nine months, with the shows still operating using nonunion labor. In November 2023, the unionized Medieval Times employees returned to work without a contract agreement.
Meanwhile, longtime employees claim that the Buena Park location is among the most profitable locations in the country, per the LA Times. Medieval Times declined to comment for this story.
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PETA has, as you can surely imagine, feelings about Medieval Times and its use of animals in the shows, too. For what it’s worth, people claiming to be former employees have posted on Reddit about how the animals get “amazing care” and are treated “better than 95% of staff.” (For what it’s additionally worth, there’s a Medieval Times … Sucks website just for airing grievances about the company and the experience.)
Did I like the experience? Yes, but I had to really put some work into that enjoyment. The food is edible, but not good. I can’t offer the same level of enthusiasm for the sugary prebatched cocktails. The show is silly, but as with many silly things, you get out of it what you put into it. My friend and I were cheering as loudly as we could for the Red & Yellow knight — “the fiercest swordsman in the kingdom,” according to his bio — with every overenthusiastic “Huzzah!” We hurled tongue-in-cheek insults at his opponents — “Off with his head!” “Ten points for Gryffindor!” “Your father smells of elderberries!” — more than a few times, once the jousting knights had been unhorsed and resorted to hand-to-hand combat.
But I don’t see myself going back anytime soon, not for a king’s ransom.
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