What’s Eating the Magic Kingdom

In 1955, when Walt Disney opened his Magic Kingdom, the Santa Ana Freeway had just been completed, and Anaheim boasted a population of 30,059 and a grand total of 87 guest rooms in five hotels and two motels.

Americans ate simply in that postwar era, and the food served at the new Disneyland reflected it. There were hot dogs and hamburgers and ice cream cones on opening day, bogus Mexican dishes at a restaurant called Casa de Fritos and plenty of the park’s official drink, Coca-Cola. For a splurge, families booked a table at a sit-down steakhouse called the Red

Wagon Inn. For a splashy dessert, there was the Santa Fe Express, a miniature choo-choo composed of three scoops of ice cream, strawberries, pineapple, chocolate sauce, banana wheels, whipped cream and cherries.

Fast-forward to 1997, where Michael P. Berry, Disneyland’s vice president of food operations and concept development, is bounding through one of his venues like a twister across Kansas, tasting pasta sauces, greeting his “cast members” like long-lost friends and eyeballing kitchen equipment with the practiced ease of a health inspector.

Berry is the park’s newest food and beverage director, a powerhouse position even if you don’t take into account that Disneyland is America’s largest single-site food-service operation. Given the throngs of presumably impressionable youths who pass through the park, Berry’s professional judgment is going play a large part in how the next generation of kids relates to food. He is, like it or not, a taste-maker, and he’s arguably going to play a part in defining the national palate for years to come. He’s also got a tall order to fill: modernize and reposition Disneyland’s menus--some of which date conceptually to the “Mickey Mouse Club”--without upsetting the applecart of nostalgia that still figures in the park’s appeal.

Berry was brought in from outside the Disney organization, and that was no coincidence. When Disney Stores merchandising whiz Paul Pressler was named president of Disneyland in 1994 at age 40, he realized he had inherited a team of generalists trained in Walt Disney’s system. He also decided that the park’s food-service operation needed new blood. These days, food is merchandising, too, as illustrated by the success of Planet Hollywood and the Hard Rock Cafe. So, after Disney’s exhaustive executive search, Berry was coaxed into accepting the position by an insistent Pressler.

A tall Yankee who croaks the name of his former employer--Hah-vuhd--exactly the way JFK did, Berry turned the university’s moribund food-service operation into a winner. Meeting him, one gets the sense that he performed the feat on sheer enthusiasm, a quality de rigueur for proper Disney employees.

Stoking the kitchen fires at Disneyland couldn’t have come a moment too soon. California Adventure, Disney’s 55-acre retail, dining and entertainment complex scheduled to open adjacent to the park in 2001, will need hot restaurant concepts to compete. Despite the new Indiana Jones Adventure attraction and the fact that park attendance rose in both 1995 and 1996, crowds at Disneyland were down this summer. (Disney doesn’t release attendance figures.)

But change doesn’t come easily to Walt’s kingdom. Berry inherited a 900-pound gorilla of a food operation plus annual pass-holders royally sensitive about tradition. It’s no mean feat to sell nostalgia and keep up with trends. Customers protested bitterly last year when, at Berry’s direction, silverware and dinner plates at Cafe Orleans and the French Market were replaced by plastic and paper, a cost-cutting experiment terminated after 45 days. Equally sacrosanct are the mint julep at New Orleans Square restaurant, the park’s curly fries and the clam chowder in a bowl of bread at Harbour Galley. When Berry made the fritters at New Orleans Square more delicate and less greasy, complaints echoed throughout the park. “I can’t touch a sandwich like the Monte Cristo served at Blue Bayou,” he says. “Too many people expect it.”

So Berry is working to “plus up” the park’s food. His plan is to “benchmark” against the best out there--a burger as good as, say, In-N-Out’s. But progress is sometimes halted by Disneyland’s many corporate sponsorship agreements. Diedrich Coffee, Ben & Jerry’s ice creams or Hebrew National hot dogs won’t be surfacing here any time soon. Disneyland has long-standing agreements with purveyors including Hills Bros., Dole, Carnation and original Disneyland sponsor Coca-Cola. These companies won’t be dislodged easily, and although Berry won’t reveal exactly how much is paid for the privilege of having their products displayed, he says: “Sure, there is a quid pro quo. The companies get worldwide brand recognition. We get cash.”

There is nothing, however, to prevent Berry from making food a more integral part of the show. Eatertainment is his term for this, and it means more costuming, themed decor and character-driven edibles. Don’t worry, kids, you won’t have to give up those Mickey Mouse pancakes. But with every new Disney Studios movie, look for a litany of new costumes, collectibles and themed foods to surface inside the park.

These promotions are not always successful. During the “Aladdin” campaign, the park tried a Middle Eastern menu that flopped. There is also no accounting for mainstream taste. Berry accompanied four chefs on a tasting tour of New Orleans last year, but pork loin with root beer is the only innovation you’ll find at Blue Bayou. “We experimented with real Louisiana flavors,” Berry says, “and the guests just didn’t go for it.”

Happily, starving is not an option. Disneyland is chockablock with regional American foods such as roasted corn, clam chowder, muffaletta (cold cuts and olive salad on Italian bread, a New Orleans specialty) and meats smoked over red oak. It is vaguely amusing that Japanese visitors to the park, like Chieko Sakai of Tokyo, couldn’t care less. All she wants, she says--as do a large number of the foreign visitors--is a burger.

So Disneyland will be holding off on the Moroccan, Norwegian and French foods that have been successfully marketed at Walt Disney World’s EPCOT Center in Florida. But when the new California Adventure opens, Berry will finally get to play Imagineer himself. The new complex, he promises, will have more than two dozen restaurants celebrating foods we eat here in California--everything from soft tacos to Korean barbecue.

What delicious irony. Walt Disney wanted food at his park to be pure Americana, and perhaps unintentionally, the concept hasn’t budged in 42 years. Retro is currently the rage in the food world, but here in the Magic Kingdom, things are merely coming full circle, like the paddle wheel on the Mark Twain Riverboat.