Sunday, June 22, 2003

I love Disney World.

There, I said it. *whew*

I really, really love The Happiest Place on Earth™. So imagine my delight when I was surfing the channels and came upon Disney Unwrapped on the Food Network!

That’s a great show. But the Disney-fied version was fantastic. I took notes…

1.  When I’m at Disney in January, I must eat at the Chez Mickey buffet.

2.  One of my favorite places is the 50s Primetime Cafe. It was fun to watch the video of other customer family members getting harrassed about having their elbows on the table by their wait staff brothers.

3.  The secret to the “cooking like Mom’s” at that restaurant is the use of old Betty Crocker cookbooks. Who knew?

4.  The people who come up with the amazingly creative ideas are called “imagineers.”

5.  At Epcot, they hire “native ambassadors” (who come to the US on one year VISAs) to represent the various countries to lend authenticity. The chefs are all natives of the country, but in some cases they’ve had to Americanize some of the dishes to make them more palettable for uncultured Americans.  For instance, in France they “use less salt and strong flavorings” as the chef put it. Interesting.

6.  At Animal Kingdom there is a restaurant called Jiko, which means “The Cooking Place.” They got quotes from folks eating there. The best, “I thought we’d be eating crickets.” Heh.

7.  Did you know that Disney does weddings there at DW? They were showing these amazing wedding cakes, with Disney themes of course. One was gorgeous with silver Mickey symbols stamped into the sides like confetti. The base of each layer was wrapped in silver ribbon and there was a white chocolate Cinderalla’s castle on top with silver on the turrets. Totally hokey, but totally beautiful too.

The coolest thing was that they will do individual wedding cakes for each guest if you want. They showes samples and they were these miniature little duplicates of the enormous cakes. Very cool.

And that’s all I wrote down.