Tiana’s Bayou Journey Is New Disney World Attraction Impressed by Late Culinary Icon Leah Chase

Walt Disney World’s latest trip, Tiana’s Bayou Journey, will open to the general public on June 28 at Magic Kingdom park in Florida, and later this yr at Disneyland in California. To have a good time, the theme park is debuting new dishes and merchandise impressed by 2009 movie The Princess and The Frog and late real-life culinary legend Leah Chase.

Tiana’s Bayou Journey is changing Splash Mountain, primarily based on the 1946 film Tune of the South, which has been broadly criticized for holding racist tropes. The brand new trip is known as for Princess and the Frog character Tiana, Disney’s first Black princess who goals of opening her personal restaurant in Twenties New Orleans. 

Tiana was impressed by “Queen of Creole Delicacies” Leah Chase, who owned and operated New Orelans restaurant Dooky Chase’s with husband Edgar “Dooky” Chase Jr. from 1946 till her demise in 2019. (“Dooky” died in 2016.) Along with serving to introduce the nation’s diners to dishes like Louisiana gumbo and Southern fried rooster, Leah performed an essential position within the Civil Rights Motion, internet hosting NAACP members and leaders together with Martin Luther King Jr. 

“Tiana wouldn’t be doable if it weren’t for Leah Chase,” explains Imagineer Carmen Smith. “She was a dreamer, a doer, and a working mother who adopted her dream to run a restaurant. She and her husband ran Dooky Chase’s in New Orleans, however it wasn’t only a restaurant. It was a gathering place that impressed so many. When Disney Animation visited New Orleans and sat down with [Leah’s daughter] Stella Chase, they knew this American authentic was the right inspiration for Disney’s first African American princess.” 

The attraction is ready a yr after the movie concludes. Princess Tiana has discovered success in her restaurant and opened up an employee-owned co-op that additionally produces its personal line of sizzling sauces and condiments. Tiana wants riders’ assist to arrange for an enormous Mardi Gras social gathering, enlisting them to discover a band to play.

The road takes riders by way of her prep kitchen, the place you’ll be able to spot a batch of Tiana’s well-known beignets being made and the gumbo pot she makes use of within the authentic movie. Imagineers took care to make sure that Tiana’s kitchen paid tribute to Chase, even outfitting the area with the identical model of cookware that Chase owned. 

“That is enormous. To showcase the arduous work of my grandparents, it means the world to us,” says Edgar “Dook” Chase IV, the present government chef of Dooky Chase’s restaurant and grandson of Leah Chase. “But it surely additionally showcases what Tiana is all about: arduous work and confidence, and that takes you to the subsequent degree. Working alongside my grandmother was a deal with. She’d invite everybody to the kitchen, and that’s what her true present was. Not solely her ardour for meals, however she cherished folks and she or he cherished to find out about you and your tradition.” 

When the trip opens on June 28, friends at Magic Kingdom will be capable of attempt dishes like Sizzling Honey Rooster, Shrimp Gumbo, and Tiana’s Well-known Beignets at venues together with The Golden Oak Outpost. They will additionally carry a style of the bayou dwelling: Choose Dooky Chase’s merchandise will likely be bought on the park’s present outlets, the primary time they’ve been obtainable for buy exterior of New Orleans. These embody Mama Odie’s Sizzling Sauce and 4 sorts of the Chases’ signature seasonings: seafood seasoning, fried rooster seasoning, meat seasoning, and their legendary gumbo base.

“My grandparents would typically say that we helped change the course of America with a bowl of gumbo, so we created a gumbo base,” says Edgar. 

With Juneteenth upon us, Edgar guesses Princess Tiana would make an okra gumbo for the vacation. “She would have a household meal that’s about bringing folks to the desk,” he says. “That’s why gumbo is so fascinating — you can’t cook dinner a small pot of gumbo, so it’s important to carry folks collectively. In any other case you’re simply going to be an enormous previous pot of gumbo. And that’s what meals does for folks, it brings us collectively to have dialogue and celebration.”