Between the flights of good mezcal and Paul Bocuse-approved jambon beurre sandwich—or was it all Remy the Rat?—a James Beard Award winning writer admits the truth
Proust had his madeleine, and Nora Ephron had her teflon pan. It was ham and cheese that changed my life.
I was all of 10 years old, on a journey far from home, and there on some picturesque little back street—like a vision of Paris from central casting—I encountered a sandwich so profound, so elementally outstanding, that it’s created a permanent memory I can’t kick. A perfect baguette, a little salty, chewy ham, and the cream dream of a few slices of soft brie, the disparate elements colliding kaleidoscopically into textural cosmos, the crunch and flake of the bread and the weight of the cheese and the primal gnaw of the ham arriving together into throes of ambrosia.
It moved me, this sandwich did, and the moment is still raw and real in my mind that every ham and brie I enjoy today takes me back to that sunny humid August morning in 1995. It plays out something like that scene in Ratatouille where our hero, Remy the Rat, experiences food as a sequence of light, color, and sound.¹
Which is appropriate, because the whole thing took place at Disney World.
Yes! Within the France Pavilion at Epcot World Showcase—a simulacra of world travel by the banks of a Central Florida lagoon—I was served a Paul Bocuse-approved jambon beurre sandwich with French butter and a little dijon that positively rocked my hungry little world². I had no clue food could taste this way—like you could actually *feel* the air in the baguette, some impossible alchemy of time and skill and atmosphere in the very bake of the bread itself. It made me think about food in a completely different way, and pushed me forward on the food writer path I’m on today. All this, at a theme park?
Thirty years later and it’s time I come clean. I am—deep sigh, cards on the table—a member of a much-maligned, widely misunderstood, occasionally profoundly cringey and altogether over-analyzed subculture of theme-park-enjoying individuals of a certain age.
Disney Adult, c’est moi.
I’ve been going to Disney theme parks—Walt Disney World—roughly once a year for my entire life, a habit that began in childhood and has been deeply fortified as a Disney World fan on the crest of middle age. The early sojourns served dual-duty: my grandfather was in an early wave of New Yorkers who moved to Florida in the middle 1960s, and by the time I was born my parents had long-established a tradition of going to visit him in Orlando around once a year. With kids in tow, adding Disney World to the proceedings became a kind of pot-sweetener; we’ll go see Grandpa, then we’ll go see Donald Duck³. Across the epoch I’ve journeyed there as a snotty teenager, a drunken 20-something, on my honeymoon, and now with my own kid, whose favorite ride (depending on the day you ask) is the Animal Kingdom safari⁴. Along the way it’s become something like an elemental part of my personality, a wealth of knowledge and expertise that stays dormant most of the time, rising like the cicada or some other form of semi-annual pestilence to consume my mind and wallet when the call must be answered.
But in retrospect, these trips were about much more than amusement—they were priming me to care about food, to be a conscious consumer of world cuisine, and to take it all in with an open mind and an empty stomach. Disney Parks do not have the reputation for such things, but every time I go to Disney I learn something, which may surprise you, and every time I eat like a champ—the food in Disney World isn’t just chicken strips and tater tots, barely good enough to get you from the People Mover to the Haunted Mansion without experiencing starvational meltdown. The food is often surprisingly great, mind-bendingly good, exciting, educational, and on par with the coolest, chicest, listicle-approved Major Dining Destinations of the world’s major conurbations.
I write about food and drinks for a living, and yet this is the first time I’ve written *anything* professionally about Disney World, which one must admit is kind of weird. Maybe there’s some embarrassment—right now, reading this, there are Disney haters in the TASTE readership who have begun to think less of me—and maybe there’s something about me keeping this all to myself, as a sort of private joy. It seems silly to be shy about my love of Disney in general, and Disney World specifically, for lord knows there is an entire ecosystem of Disney Parks content to consume; when I was a kid I would religiously digest the annual Fodor’s Guide, and today the world for Disney journalism is extremely online and very, very hungry.⁵
My north star in this world-within-a-Disney-World is Carlye Wisel, theme park journalist and host of Very Amusing, a podcast dedicated to the wide world of Disney. Unlike me, she did not grow up Disney-pilled (and/or brainwashed, depending on your POV), but came to the culture later in life. “I went to Disney World for my bachelorette party on a whim,” she tells me, “and became so obsessed that it’s now the focus of my entire reporting career.” Today she has upwards of 100k followers across multiple social platforms, and has contributed Disney journalism to a who’s who of legacy media houses, including Vanity Fair, GQ, Travel + Leisure, and Eater (with whom she won an ASME award in 2017). Her account is part real-time working guide, part travelogue, and I find it all oddly arresting. I cannot go to Disney once a month, nor do I desire to, but I’m never far from the world of the parks with Carlye.
These trips were about much more than amusement—they were priming me to care about food, to be a conscious consumer of world cuisine, and to take it all in with an open mind and an empty stomach.
She, too, is obsessed with the food. “What’s so special about Disney Parks is that they try to offer something for everyone and actually succeed at it,” she says. “For every gummy worm topped drink, there’s a banger of a sushi restaurant, so long as you know where to look. Did you know there’s an omakase restaurant in Epcot? Or one of the longest-running dinner theatre shows at a Disney World hotel? Whatever you want, they’ve got it.”
In this way I see her work as confronting a stigma around the basic cheugicity⁶ of Disney Adulthood—it is much more than an endless parade of chicken nuggets and French fries, though you’ll find that, verily, alongside other culinary experiences that confound expectations. Or maybe that’s my own shame spiral to unpack; maybe having Carlye to show me a cohort-peer enjoying the ever-living-shit out of Disney as an adult makes it feel more alright for me to do the same.
Why isn’t Disney World in Central Florida rightly acknowledged as a serious culinary hub? What other theme park invites you to eat cheeseburger bao buns with blue raspberry popping jelly⁸, order from a 100% South African wine list next to zebras and bonteboks, then journey into the last remaining location of the Hollywood Brown Derby for grapefruit cake and time traveling Cobb salad, all in one property? “Disney takes their culinary offerings so seriously,” Wisel tells me, “and the power of the Disney brand recruits such incredible talent that there’s incredible food to be found resort-wide.”
So where’s the respect? Why does saying this with my chest make me feel cringe?
Going to Disney as a kid taught me a lot about trip planning; one does not really *vacation* at Disney World so much as take on the park as a series of conquerable tasks. And it’s possible to eat and drink tremendously well at Disney World, with a little guidance. EPCOT alone is a moveable feast in theme park form; it’s estimated that as many as 50% of Americans don’t have a passport, and my family didn’t really take overseas trips, so this place really was my first glimpse of international travel. The aforementioned World Pavilion offers an impressive selection tequilas and mezcals (Contraluz, Vago Elote, Real Minero and much more) inside the Mexico Pavilion ziggurat, a litre of Guinness and Harp at the British pub, my first experience with proper sushi—like uni, eel, mackerel, and other dishes beyond the suburban California roll paradigm— upstairs at the Japan Pavilion, a kringla and some Voss mineral water from the Norwegian bakery, and pretty damn good poutine from the Canadian steakhouse.
Why isn’t Disney World in Central Florida rightly acknowledged as a serious culinary hub?
The other half of EPCOT, called World Showcase, features a boat tour through a working vertically integrated eco-farm called Living with the Land, where a team of horticulturalists (working inside a sort of late 20th Century Futurist bio-dome-like structure) cultivate fruit and vegetables from around the world alongside farmed fish and shrimp in an impressive hydroponic nutrient loop. The fruits and fish grown here are then served next door at the Garden Grill restaurant, whilst oversized anthropomorphic cartoon chipmunks cavort alongside diners, because Disney World is an exploded hyper-real fantasy of unfathomable depth and convolution. All this made quite an impression on me as a kid, and each time I hear about a restaurant’s working farm (at Amass⁷, or Blue Hill at Stone Barns, etc.) I think, “Hey—they were doing that at Disney World in the ‘80s!” I can chart so much of my current interests in food back to Disney World as a kind of baseline. It’s an incredibly powerful place to take a kid interested in food, or to go as an adult whose life revolves around that very same passion.
Today, as an elder millennial, “yeah-man”-slacker adult, or whatever we are, I’ve got my Carlye queued up, and I’m decked out in cool-weird grey market fan t-shirts from @singlerider1971 (there is a thriving grey market for Disney fan t-shirts and vintage clothing). I couldn’t do this every weekend, or even once a month, but every year or so this weird hidden part of me comes alive and subsumes the wider substrata of my brain.
Want to know where to find the best quick service in the Animal Kingdom? It’s in the Avatar section, at the spot that serves space alien bao buns and drinks with popping jelly.⁸ Curious to find the park’s best wine list? California Grill upstairs of the Contemporary Resort is epically stocked Krug and Taittinger and Trimbach and Sea Smoke and Pahlmeyer, and you get to watch the fireworks with dessert.⁹ Where’s the best cocktail? Probably at Nomad Lounge (Carlye’s a fan), or at Trader Sam’s Grog Grotto¹⁰, or maybe a martini at Shula’s¹¹, inside the absolutely bonkers Michael Graves designed Swan & Dolphin hotel complex¹², but then again, I’ve been known to sink a Scotch over at the Yachtsman Steakhouse (inside the Yacht Club Resort), and this is before we even get to Disney Springs, a sprawling playground of outdoor dining and shopping that features no-shit-no-joking one of the best Irish pubs in America (Raglan Road) and an outpost of Jaleo, in case the Disney heat has you desirous of Jose Andres’ signature molecular salt foam margarita.
Even the Magic Kingdom, which is the theme parkiest of all the Disney World theme parks in terms of offerings, has unnecessarily good hand dipped corn dogs (at Sleepy Hollow in Liberty Square) and, of course, Dole Whip.¹³
Combine the millennial trend for microdosing¹⁴ with the millennial acceptance for post-ironic Disney Adulthood and you’ve got yourself a stew there, mister (or perhaps even a fine rat-chef’d potato and leek soup). I’m over the shame and done with the stigma. Sign me up for a Park Hopper, man. I’ve been training for this my whole life.
¹ Ratatouille (2007) being the finest Disney film made in my lifetime, though Turning Red (2022) is a close second. ² Roger Vergé, Gaston Lenôtre, and Paul Bocuse opened Chefs du France at the French Pavilion in Epcot in 1982. Since 1996, it has been operated by Jérôme Bocuse, Paul’s son, in a manner that somewhat resembles ((and perhaps pre-visioned) the plot of Ratatouille (2007). ³ Sometimes referred to as the 11th Commandment for New York Jews: “Thou shalt move south and wait.” ⁴ Alternate favorites as of press time include Peter Pan’s Flight, the Monorail, and Space Mountain (though it’s a little scary). ⁵ There’s several thousand—perhaps as many as ten thousand—dedicated Instagram accounts of notable size (in excess of 1k followers) producing daily social media content predicated on Disney, placing it somewhere in the ballpark of professional sports fandom and NYC dining recommendations in terms of overall social footprint. ⁶ Denoting the quality or condition of being cheugy. ⁷ R.I.P. ⁸ I otherwise do not care for Avatar. ⁹ The best wine list in Disney World *used* to be at Jiko—The Cooking Place, inside Disney’s gorgeous Animal Kingdom Lodge. Prior to the pandemic it was the most extensive South African wine list in the Western Hemisphere, though it has been significantly pared back in recent years. There’s also nice wine at the Tutto Gusto wine cellar in the Italy pavilion back in EPCOT. ¹⁰ Arrive early and be prepared to wait. ¹¹ Named for Miami Dolphins coach Don Shula, still the winningest coach in NFL history. ¹² Member of the New York Five and professor of architecture at Princeton for some 40 years, this is perhaps his most significant postmodern work, and exemplifies Graves’ distinctive late 20th century modality of quote “entertainment architecture”. ¹³ Some amount of suspension of disbelief and / or holding ones hands over ones eyes is to be expected whilst enjoying a product named for the Dole Corporation, whose many centuries of misdeeds require us to be succinct in summary—if I had to choose a top two, I would say overthrowing the Hawaiian monarchy and forcing the Cavendish banana upon us all are among the worst. ¹⁴ Sorry, mom.