A celebration of everyone’s favorite Pixar stories is taking over the Disneyland Resort as Pixar Fest finally begins today! You’ll find Pixar-inspired parades, a new fireworks spectacular, tons of characters, and of course… FOOD! Here’s your exclusive Foodie Guide to everything Pixar Fest.
Disneyland Park
Starting on Main Street, U.S.A., you’ll find some special items inspired by the Disney•Pixar film “Up,” including the Frozen Grape Soda Slush at the Main Street Coffee Cart. Also at this location will be specialty doughnuts featuring the iconic balloons and Russell’s badge sash. And at Gibson Girl Ice Cream Parlor, you’ll find a Salted Caramel Butter Pecan Sundae with butter pecan and chocolate ice cream topped with salted caramel sauce, whipped cream, and candied pecans.
Jolly Holiday Bakery Café will be serving “Up”-inspired Chocolate-Hazelnut Pastries and Specialty Éclairs with imagery featuring Carl Fredricksen and Russell’s badges, and right next door at Refreshment Corner, you’ll find a new all-beef hot dog! The Pastrami Dog is topped with pastrami, sauerkraut, special sauce, a dill pickle spear, and chives and served on an artisan bun.
Across the street, Plaza Inn will be dishing out slices of Pixar Lemon-Raspberry Cake. This yummy dessert has layers of lemon, blue vanilla, and red velvet sponge cakes with raspberry purée and cream cheese frosting and is topped with a chocolate half-dome featuring that lovable, fun Pixar Ball! You’ll also find this cake in Disney California Adventure park at Pacific Wharf Café and Paradise Garden Grill.
Also at Plaza Inn is a special dining package that includes a picnic-style lunch and access to a reserved viewing area for the “Pixar Play Parade.” This picnic lunch includes your choice of either fried chicken, penne pasta with marinara sauce and Parmesan cheese, or a bed of greens tossed in house-made ranch dressing, cheddar cheese, beans, pickled onions, and tomatoes. Each entrée is served with white cheddar mac & cheese, lemon-thyme green beans, refreshing watermelon-feta cheese salad, and a chocolate-caramel pudding for dessert. Be sure to make reservations today for this amazing dining package.
At Carnation Café, you’ll find a couple dishes inspired by Carl Fredricksen from “Up.” The Fried Bologna Sandwich features pan-seared bologna, toasted Pullman bread, aïoli, pickles, lettuce, and tomato. Then there’s the Pork Chop Dinner served on a “TV tray” with a spiced apple pork chop, mashed potatoes, peas and carrots, a corn muffin, and a decadent molten lava cake.
In Frontierland, you’ll find some rootin’ tootin’ sweets inspired by the Disney•Pixar film “Toy Story,” including a Berry Funnel Cake at Stage Door Café – a house-made funnel cake topped with blueberries, strawberries, chocolate cookie crumbles, crème anglaise, white chocolate, and gold-dusted whipped cream.
If you can’t get enough funnel cake, there’s also a Strawberry Funnel Cake over in Critter Countryat Hungry Bear Restaurant. This house-made funnel cake is inspired by everyone’s favorite unicorn, Buttercup, and comes with strawberry-cherry topping, strawberry butter, and streusel with a spice syrup drizzle.
Back in Frontierland at Rancho del Zocalo Restaurante, you’ll find Al Pastor Huarache. This dish, inspired by the Disney•Pixar film “Coco,” features refried beans, al pastor-marinated pork, pineapple slaw, pasilla pepper crema, Mexican crema, and queso fresco, and it’s served with pickled carrots and fried serrano chili. For dessert, you can get the Mexican Chocolate Pot de Crème.
In New Orleans Square, Café Orleans will be serving up a themed three-course meal inspired by the Disney•Pixar film “Ratatouille.” The first course features a specialty cheese flight with three cheeses, dried fruit, and honeycomb. For the main event, it’s Remy’s favorite dish – Shrimp Ratatouille Byaldi layered with roasted zucchini, yellow squash, eggplant, and tomato. The third course will feature Berry-Stuffed Beignets à la Mode served with a sweet brie drizzle and mascarpone. And nearby at the Royal Street Veranda, you’ll find a delicious Potato-Leek Soup.
We can’t forget Alien Pizza Planet in Tomorrowland! The Aliens from “Toy Story” have sourced the finest ingredients from across the universe to deliver fresh, hot pizzas that are out of this world. These pizzas include a Cheeseburger Pizza with ketchup, yellow mustard, and pizza sauce on a sesame seed crust and topped with American and Cheddar cheese, caramelized onions, diced tomatoes, slider patties, house-made burger sauce, and pickles, as well as Cheese, Pepperoni, and Vegetarian Pizzas.
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A Chicken Caesar Salad will also be offered, along with an Antipasto Salad, Edamame-Noodle Salad, and Pesto Pasta. The Antipasto Salad consists of crisp lettuce topped with pepperoni, tomatoes, mixed olives, pepperoncini, fresh mozzarella, roasted red pepper, and roasted red onions tossed in a balsamic vinaigrette. The Edamame-Noodle Salad features grilled chicken breast on top of marinated edamame, sweet green beans, mint, cilantro, red cabbage, shredded carrot, and cold soba noodles with a ginger-lime vinaigrette. The Pesto Pasta is a gemelli pasta tossed in a spinach and miso pesto with smoky bacon, sweet peas, and Parmesan. And of course, you can pair any of these dishes with a side of fresh bread sticks or a side salad.
On the sweet side of the Alien Pizza Planet menu, we’ve got Strawberry and Sour Apple Slushes, as well as an adorable Macaron and a Blackberry-Lime Parfait.
Throughout the park there will also be some exciting new churros and snacks! Outdoor carts and kiosks will be serving up Cotton Candy inspired by Nemo from the Disney•Pixar film “Finding Nemo” with orange and white stripes and a fresh orange-vanilla flavor (also found at various carts in Disney California Adventure park). At the Town Square Churro Cart and the Churro Cart in front of Sleeping Beauty Castle will be Lemon Churros with lemon sugar and multi-colored fruity cereal. The Tomorrowland Churro Cart will feature a Strawberry Churro with strawberry sugar, and the Frontierland Churro Cart will feature a Cocoa Churro with chocolate powder, salted cinnamon sugar, and a Mexican chocolate dipping sauce. The Frontierland Pretzel Cart will be offering a Cinnamon Pretzel. And finally, at the New Orleans Square Churro Cart, you’ll find a Carrot Cake Churro rolled in cinnamon sugar with raisin-carrot cream cheese frosting.
Disney California Adventure Park
Starting in Hollywood Land there’s some special sweets that you won’t want to miss! Schmoozies is serving up some fun treats inspired by the Disney•Pixar film “Monsters Inc.,” including Whoopie Pies, a Mint Chip Shake, and a Marshmallow Doughnut with marshmallow fluff filling. And right down the street at Award Wieners, you’ll find Funnel Cake Fries topped with whipped cream and fruity cereal. If you’re looking for a savory option, Award Wieners is also dishing up a Pulled Pork Dog – an all-beef hot dog topped with pulled pork, spicy teriyaki sauce, and fresh pineapple salsa.
You’ll find an ‘incredible’ Spicy Corn Dog at Corn Dog Castle with two different sausages (hot link sausage and Cajun chicken sausage) with pepper jack cheese, all put together, dipped in corn dog batter, fried to a golden brown, and served with a sweet and spicy blackberry-serrano chile sauce with choice of chips or apples, inspired by the Disney•Pixar film “The Incredibles.”
At Fairfax Market and Boudin Bread Cart, the bread shaped like Mike Wazowski from “Monsters Inc.” is sure to be a favorite! On Pacific Wharf, Lucky Fortune Cookery will be serving up another item inspired by this animated favorite – Chilled Noodle Salad. These chilled iridescent noodles come with herbaceous preserved plants, sweet and spicy vinaigrette, crushed and toasted peanuts, mint, Thai basil, shredded daikon, and carrots. And right next door at Cocina Cucamonga Mexican Grill, there’s a decadent Tres Leches Parfait with layers of vanilla cake, sweet caramel cream, and rum.
Drive on over to Cars Land to the Cozy Cone Motel for “Choose Your Racer” Churros! There’s three colored sugars to choose from inspired by the Disney•Pixar film “Cars” – yellow for Cruz, red for Lightning McQueen and blue for Storm. You’ll also find a Champions Corn Cup with fresh corn, flavored mayonnaise, cotija cheese, chili-lime spice, and lime; and a Habanero Meatball Cone with turkey meatballs in a habanero derby sauce with a cheese crisp and spiral pasta “smoke stacks.” And for the soft-serve ice cream, you can add Road Gravel Ice Cream Topping to your cold treat. This topping consists of cookie crumbles.
Nearby at A Bug’s Land is an Iced Specialty Churro at the Churro Cart. This churro is drizzled with doughnut icing and dusted with cocoa cereal. At various outdoor carts and kiosks throughout the park, you’ll be able to find the orange-cream Nemo-inspired Cotton Candy as well as Sour Lemon Cotton Candy.
Paradise Garden Grill has quite the variety of delicious items – all inspired by “Coco” – like the Yucatan-Inspired Vaporcitos – chicken tamales steamed in banana leaves with ranchero salsa, golden rice, and black beans. There’s also Mole Verde con Pollo (herb-braised chicken with golden rice, black beans, and corn tortillas), Tortitas de Papa con Queso (crispy potato cakes with Oaxaca Cheese, ranchero salsa, golden rice, and pickled onion salad), Tacos de Estilo Callejero (trio of sirloin beef tacos with pickled vegetables, golden rice, and black beans), and Ensalada de Frutas (jicama, watermelon, cucumber, pineapple, and mango with chili-lime salt and chamoy).
And for dessert – try the Tres Leches Parfait with rum and vanilla bean Chantilly, drizzled with Dulce de Leche and garnished with a chocolate disc featuring Miguel’s loyal sidekick, Dante. There’s also an Agua de Jamaica Slush, Mexican Hot Chocolate and the Pixar Lemon-Raspberry Cake.
So there you have it! All things edible and delicious at Pixar Fest at Disneyland Resort. The festival runs tomorrow through September 3.
For more portable versions, go to the Mint Julep Bar in New Orleans Square, where an order of three comes in a paper bag and is dusted with plenty of powdered sugar. (Note: Those lime-and-mint beverages in question are non-alcoholic.) With the return of the Fantasmic evening pyrotechnics show in Frontierland, the Mint Julep Bar is now also serving purple-sprinkles-covered Blackberry Beignets.
This non-dairy frozen treat debuted at Disneyland in 1976, created exclusively for Adventureland by the folks at Dole Pineapple. It has developed a passionate cult following—it has been called “a work of art” and has a podcast named after it—and is now offered at other Disney parks, as well as a few other scattered locations. The original, though, is at the Tiki Juice Bar stand outside the Enchanted Tiki Room. Order yours as a soft-serve, a float with pineapple juice, or be a rebel and ask for the lone pineapple spear. A pleasant surprise: the classic Dole Whip soft serve has only about 100 calories.
These mountain-shaped coconut treats—covered with white-chocolate icing and sugary “snow”—are a rarity among Disney-themed goodies in that they’re based not on a character, but an actual ride. The classic Matterhorn coaster is even within view of the macaroons’ Main Street home, the Mary Poppins-themed Jolly Holiday Bakery Café (look for the telltale weather vane on top).
The jumbo drumsticks offered at hot-food carts around the two parks—like Edelweiss Snacks in Fantasyland and the hot-foods cart in Hollywood Land—have inspired so much awe that an urban legend once floated around that they actually came from ostriches (they don’t). Granted, the hickory-smoked legs look large, even for a turkey (they come from male Toms) and the salt curing gives them an almost ham-like flavor. To be sure, they are a commitment: Each one weighs 1.5 pounds.
There are more than a dozen churro carts dotting the parks—from outside The Haunted Mansion in Disneyland to A Bug’s Land in California Adventure—and the fried-dough treats have even inspired their own souvenir shirts over the years. Keep an eye out for limited-release variations, like golden-sugar-dusted churros in honor of Pirates of the Caribbean, or the Jedi-worthy, red- and blue-sugared “light-saber” churros in Tomorrowland.
In its cultural and culinary rendering of the Golden State, Disney California Adventure Park has embraced one key representative of San Francisco: Ghirardelli Chocolate. The Disney branch of the Ghirardelli Soda Fountain & Chocolate Shop, located in the Pacific Wharf section, offers up scoops and chocolate-doused sundaes, as well as the clearly-meant-for-sharing Earthquake, with eight scoops of ice cream, eight toppings, bananas, whipped cream, and more. Don’t miss the mural of San Francisco in the shop, which reacts to your order: Buildings shake when you order an Earthquake, and a prospector pans for gold if you get the hot-fudge-and-peanut-butter Gold Rush.
In the Cars Land area of California Adventure, “refueling” takes on new meaning at the Cozy Cone Motel, a snack stand with five different cone-based treat options, from the chili-filled Chili Cone Queso to breakfast scrambles. Reviewers have especially loved the stand’s Chicken Verde Cone and the Red’s Apple Freeze, a slushy made with apple juice, passion fruit, toasted marshmallow syrup, and mango foam.