ANAHEIM, Calif. — The Dole Whip strawberry sundae at Disneyland, in its first minute of life, looks perfect. Filled with fresh fruit and a syrupy drizzle, encased in soft cake crumbs, it has the dazzling color and softly drooping tip of a cartoon dessert.
By the time you pick up a spoon and find a place to sit, this may no longer be true. But the day I met AJ Wolfe at Disneyland, it was cloudy and a little chilly, and the sundae held up just fine.
Using her phone, Mrs. Wolfe took a vertical shot, then a horizontal shot. A hero photo, then a group photo of all the snacks we ordered from Tropical Hideaway in Adventureland. Together we tasted everything on the table.
By then, the sundae was melting – a super-sweet, sickly pink, half-eaten wreck that had managed to make everything in a three-foot radius sticky, including my phone, my hands, and my eyelashes (how?). I found myself going back for appetizers, but by then I almost begrudged it.
Fortunately, Mrs. Wolfe had packed wet wipes. At the age of 44, she lives in Dallas and runs Disney Food Blog, a website title with perfect search engine optimization that employs more than 30 people. There are many Disney fan sites on the Internet that explore our intense and complicated relationships with the multinational conglomerate, but few take theme park food, and by extension the people obsessed with its pleasures, so seriously.
“Disney is a religion for people – a drug,” she said. “I know because there was a time when all my thoughts were focused on, How do I get there again?”
In 2008, just before she started the site, Mrs. Wolfe lived in a small apartment on the northern tip of Staten Island and filled her credit cards with trips to Disney World in Florida. For a time, the park was all that mattered—a trap door at the back of her life as a grant writer, which ended in perfect, if temporary, happiness.
From the beginning, what Ms. Wolfe loved most about Disney was the food. She documented every chicken tender and corn dog with her Kodak point-and-shoot camera, treated every ice cream cone the way of a serious food blogger, shuffled around to be near a window, or rushed dishes out before they melted to take pictures. in the best light, with the most beautiful background. Over time, she built up an archive of the food in the parks, with continuously updated notes on every bakery, restaurant, and kiosk.
When Disneyland opened in Anaheim in 1955, the food offerings weren’t all that different from what you’d find at a local fair—hot dogs, fried chicken, barbecue, and pancakes. That genre of food hasn’t gone away — there’s always a wait for the incomprehensibly large and glistening turkey legs — but as Disney parks have expanded and matured around the world, so have their menus.
Today, there’s a discreet corporate “taste lab” at Disney World where chefs experiment with new dishes, a series of great food and wine festivals, as well as sit-down restaurants serving everything from Zanzibar-inspired vegetable curry to roast duck with pistachio pate. Foodbeat reporters for Disney Food Blog are in the parks every day catching and capturing new items.
Disneyland, in Anaheim, is known as a park of sorts to the locals — I know a lot of Angelenos who grew up with annual passes (as well as those who take it as a red flag when people brag about annual passes on dating apps). Although I live about 45 minutes away, I had never been there until meeting Mrs. Wolfe there for a day of snacking that began with fluffy, malty-scented Mickey Waffles at Carnation Cafe.
“You didn’t touch your ears,” said our server, Dave, pouring us more coffee and telling us that Walt Disney hired his father as an animator in the 1950s.
About a third of visitors here are “Disney adults,” or as Disney calls them “non-family guests,” meaning adults with no kids in tow — often for birthdays, dates, anniversaries, and honeymoons. Die-hard Disney fans have an annual pass and don’t need a reason to come by. They know the park and its offerings inside out, in long-term relationships that are maintained throughout their lives. (Disney has tried, and failed, to prevent people from scattering the ashes of their loved ones in the park, especially on rides like Haunted Mansion and Pirates of the Caribbean.)
On the slow, white tram that takes you from the parking lot to the park entrance, I thought I was supposed to look like a Disney adult, clutching my tote bag, riding alone into Disneyland.
I was basically a Disney kid. When I was 8, my father took a job at Disneyland Paris, which was not in Paris at all, but in Chessy, about 20 miles east of the city. This was the early 1990s, during the renaissance years for Disney animation – the years of “Aladdin,” “The Lion King,” and “Beauty and the Beast.”
Before the park officially opened, my family stayed a few nights in each of the American-themed hotels, ate at all the restaurants, and answered detailed questionnaires about each meal. I had never been to the United States, and without any understanding of these foods and their origins, I ate black bean soup and tortilla chips at the Santa Fe themed hotel, and oysters Rockefeller at a replica of New York City’s Rainbow Room. York themed hotel.
I could have lived off the park’s hot caramel popcorn, the scent of which was pumped into the air at several key points in the park and which I can now accurately recall, if I take a deep breath. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that my first Oreo milkshake — from Annette’s Diner in Disney Village, where most of the clerks worked on roller skates — changed the course of my life.
I usually don’t say all of that though, because it sounds absurd. And did I really enjoy the food, or did the theme park exhaustion and frustration leave me so emotionally vulnerable that I clung to the pleasures of a milkshake? There’s no way of knowing what effect a few years of extremely high Disney doses had on me.
The brand’s culinary reference points can be as vibrant and enduring as the characters and stories. Chad Wright and Venessa Hinojosa-Wright met in 2009 while working at Disney World. They later got married there and put Disney’s sweet potato pancakes on their wedding brunch menu.
Although they no longer work for the company, they still enjoy going to the parks and blogging about them on their Two Tickets to Adventure YouTube channel. During the holiday season, they keep an eye out for the lightly spiced, super-soft gingerbread Mickey Mouse cookies. “They are very coveted in the Disney community,” said Ms. Hinojosa-Wright, who explained that every year a portion of the cookies are sold by scalpers on Facebook Marketplace.
Ms. Wolfe’s food fan site caters to families traveling for the first time with detailed instructions and tips, as well as Disney fans who just want to know what’s changed – if there’s a new chef or menu item, a new hard-to-get, limited edition seasonal snack – since their last visit.
When she developed the site, Ms. Wolfe’s goal was to show all readers what Disney food really looked like. She didn’t reserve a restaurant under her own name, avoided photos on the Internet (and for this article), and paid for her own meals.
“I’m old-fashioned, which is how restaurant critics do it,” she said.
She ripped open cheese sticks so the camera could reveal their tough or stringy insides, depending on the temperature at which they were served; scooped up soups and sundaes and lightened their texture; and broke apart cupcakes and cookies.
“These families are going to spend so much money,” Ms Wolfe said. “They don’t need to see perfect images of the food; they need to see what they’re actually going to get.”
What you’re actually going to get at Disneyland is, of course, impossible to predict. The crowds swell and prices rise. Characters disappear shortly after you arrive to see them. Wait times for restaurants and rides unfold indefinitely. Important rides are shut down and snacks disappear. And bathrooms are never around when you really need them. You don’t know when something is going to deviate from the script, only that it is.
After waffles and sundaes, egg roll and char siu bao, chicken tenders and mac and cheese, blue milk and green milk, one of our last stops of the day was Oga’s Cantina, in Galaxy’s Edge. The “Star Wars” themed bar also happens to be one of the few places in the park that serves alcohol, including a vodka, falernum, and Curaçao-tipped juice called the Jedi Mind Trick. The drinks don’t make as much sense as cocktails, but still I couldn’t wait to have one in front of me, preferably with a ridiculous garnish on it.
Mrs. Wolfe put us on a waiting list and we walked around, delighted that the wait at Oga’s was only 20 minutes today. But within seconds of entering, it became clear that something had gone horribly wrong.
“Waste of protein,” Mrs. Wolfe said authoritatively. “Do you want to get out of here?”
“Protein spill” is soft Disneyland slang for vomit. And in a dark, windowless, overcrowded room like Oga’s, the smell is both extremely unpleasant and impossible to escape. My eyes hadn’t had time to adjust to the darkness, to take in the details or design of the room. I hadn’t even opened the menu. But the answer was yes, I wanted to get out of there. We all did.
Later, under the shade of an umbrella, Mrs. Wolfe and I shared a paper basket of corn dogs. They were warm and bulging, crispy but yielding, with succulent sausages inside. They were almost sweet and the batter hadn’t soaked up too much oil from the fryer. They were, as the sign advertised, “hand dipped.”
I had tasted so many snacks by then that I was almost non-functioning as a critic, unable to process. The corn dog was fine, but in the chaos of the park during the spring break wave, after walking about 10,000 steps (Ms. Wolfe kept track of it for us), the corn dog was more than fine, too.
It wasn’t an Oreo milkshake, but it was comfort, enrichment, and even joy. For a minute or two, the corn dog at Disneyland was everything.
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