Our Chicago trip took a hard left turn into the year 1500 when we booked the VIP experience at Medieval Times. If you've never been: it's a dinner show inside a building shaped like a castle, where knights on real horses joust and sword-fight while you eat an entire roast chicken with your bare hands. It is exactly as ridiculous as that sounds, and we loved every minute.
Walking into the castle
The Medieval Times castle sits in Schaumburg, outside Chicago, and they commit to the bit from the front door. The lobby is a full medieval hall: suits of armor, a bar serving drinks in souvenir goblets, cast members in costume addressing everyone as m'lord and m'lady. Fabiola got crowned at the door, which she took extremely seriously for the rest of the night. Before the show you're sorted into a color, and your color is your knight. We drew yellow. This will matter.
Dinner, no utensils
The VIP package got us seats close to the arena and first service, and then the famous part: dinner arrives and there is no silverware. Tomato soup you drink from the bowl, garlic bread, half a roast chicken, corn, a potato, all eaten medieval-style with your hands. It sounds like a gimmick and then somewhere around the second piece of chicken you stop being self-conscious and start having the best time. Fabiola, who has actual table manners, needed a minute. Nathan adapted suspiciously fast.
The show begins
The arena is a real dirt floor surrounded by stadium seating, and the production is bigger than we expected: trained Andalusian horses doing dressage, falconry with a bird swooping inches over the crowd, and a storyline about a tournament to defend the throne. If you're a Game of Thrones person, the whole thing scratches that itch minus the funerals. The knight introductions are peak sports-entertainment. Each section loses its mind for its own color and boos everyone else, and within minutes we were fully invested strangers screaming for a man in yellow we'd met via public address system.
The tournament
The tournament itself is jousting, sword fights, and games on horseback, and the choreography is legitimately athletic. Lances splinter, sparks come off the swords, knights get unhorsed and carry on the fight on foot. The performers are stunt riders doing this show night after night, and up close (the VIP seats put you nearly on the rail) you can see how much skill is under the theater. We will not spoil how the yellow knight's evening went. We will say that the emotional journey of two adults living and dying by a scripted joust surprised even us.
Was VIP worth it?
For a first visit, we'd say yes. The closer seats, early entry, and first-served dinner smoothed out the parts of a themed dinner show that can drag, and the photos from the rail are the ones we kept. Would a regular ticket still be fun? Almost certainly. But if you're going to commit to yelling for a fake knight over a chicken carcass, you might as well commit all the way.
Watch the joust, the feast, and our complete loss of composure: watch the full video on YouTube. We also send a short weekly newsletter about where we are and what broke this week. The signup form is on our newsletter page.