Dancing Crane Cafe

The prices are astronomical. I would recommend your force your kids to wait till you leave the zoo and go eat somewhere else. Some of the employees are not very friendly and do not pay much attention to what’s going on around them. Seating can be very crowded at times.

The café is average with food quality. There are a few refrigerated choices that are healthier than chicken fingers and fries. They had pretzels with hummus, salad, organize milk, and deli sandwiches. The food and drinks are overpriced. Great spot to take shelter from the hot sun, definitely not my first choice first lunch.

A great place to have a bite. I met my friends from Massachusetts here for lunch before we toured the Central Park Zoo. The food is hamburgers, sandwiches, salads. Everything was fresh and tasted good. The prices were fine for Manhattan. My out-​of-​town friends thought prices were high. When we finished visiting the zoo, we stopped back at the café to get drinks and relax a bit.

Bad bad bad!
Got food poisoning there yesterday Mother’s Day with my child.
I ate the burger and 1.5 hour later I started to throw up badly!
Don’t eat there!!!
I already filed a 311 complaint.

Expensive of course… it is in central park and a zoo next to it. Need to being out more tables! Its also nice that strollers need to be kept outside of café, there is alot of kids here. So not crowded at all inside

Not a nice place which is a real shame given the great location. It’s fast food but no pizzas were available and the hot dogs and burgers we had were cold and greasy. Not recommended.

first, very expensive for cold food pizza was cold, burgers were cold, chicken cold, the salad old over all very bad experience

Of course it’s expensive, it’s a café in a zoo, but the staff were really nice to me. Expect to pay about $ 13 for a drink, soup, and fries. All were «carnival» quality. Again, it’s a zoo, what should i expect — not much.
Luckily for me I went the day before Mayor Bloomberg was going to ban large sodas, so they were giving out their souvenir 32 once cups. Sometimes you’re just hungry at the zoo and have to eat.

After eating here, I was kicking myself for not packing a lunch to bring with us into the zoo, but it was a busy week and we had to leave early that morning to get into the city so I didn’t get a chance to pack a lunch and we didn’t have time to leave the zoo and then come back to finish our visit as we had tickets to a show later in the afternoon.
I had the Cobb salad. The salad really wasn’t great and there were only two choices for salad dressing. My husband had the chicken parm panini, which was meh. I tried to get fresh fruit, but all the pieces in the basket had mold starting to grow on them so I passed on the fruit. The other options were chicken fingers, burgers, and fries. I posted a picture of the menu so you get an idea.
When we go again, I will be bringing a lunch or leaving (since we will have more time) to head over to Arthur Ave to have some authentic Italian.