by Heather Hodges

When people tell you they are going to New Orleans, what they probably mean (and what you immediately envision) is the old French Quarter.

Jazz musicians and Jackson Square. Sugary beignets and Creole restaurants. It’s an idealized rendition of the city that has been reliably performed and served daily for millions of tourists, year after year. It is not surprising that variations of such a bankable visitor draw have been espoused by the Walt Disney Company. This includes attractions like New Orleans Square at Disneyland, which opened in the 1960s, and its newest ride at Walt Disney World, Tiana’s Bayou Adventure.

The Tiana ride is rooted in the fictional New Orleans story of an African American waitress-turned princess-turned-restaurateur. And that is remarkable because the truest part of all of this layered storytelling about the so-called Big Easy is how essential working-class Black women are to the stories we have long told the world about what it means to eat New Orleans.

Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, which opened this summer, replaces Splash Mountain. The previous attraction borrowed from Song of the South, a 1946 Disney film long condemned for its romanticized and racist depictions of the nineteenth-century South. By contrast, many critics hailed the company’s portrayal of Tiana—heroine of the 2009 animated film The Princess and the Frog and Disney’s first African American princess—as culturally sensitive.

As Walt Disney told a Times Picayune reporter in 1956, “Once you’ve finalized a film and released it, you can’t change it. But at Disneyland, we can always change things around if we think it can be done better.”

Inspired in part by Leah Chase, the late, legendary chef of Dooky Chase’s Restaurant fame, the character Tiana didn’t belong to a royal family. She was a 1920s New Orleans waitress who achieved her dream of opening her own restaurant, which she called Tiana’s Palace.

Tiana’s Bayou Adventure takes up the Tiana tale where the movie left her, inviting guests to join Princess Tiana on a journey through the bayou as she tracks down “the missing ingredient” (a band of musicians) for her Mardi Gras celebration—to which we are all invited. TONIGHT ONLY! A CELEBRATION OF FAMILY AND FRIENDS OF NEW ORLEANS AT THE PROUD HOME OF PRINCESS TIANA AND PRINCE NAVEEN—EVERYONE IS WELCOME! beckons a sign posted above the ride’s entrance.

For the past few years, Walt Disney Imagineering had sent teams down to New Orleans to conduct historic and cultural research for the new ride. Since the ride is set in Carnival season, imagineers first visited the Historic New Orleans Collection (HNOC), where I work, in 2022 to view our “Making Mardi Gras” exhibit. It wasn’t the first time Disney had done a deep dive into our city’s history and culture. Company co-founder Walt Disney spent extensive time in New Orleans and dined often at our storied restaurants.

HNOC’s archives contain a restaurant menu that we shared with the Imagineers on one of their visits. On June 5, 1956, Antoine’s Restaurant in the French Quarter hosted a private dinner for Walt and Lillian Disney. Established in 1840, Antoine’s is the oldest of the white-tablecloth, French-Creole restaurants in the Vieux Carré.

WELCOME TO ANTOINE’S LAND, the menu proclaimed. The special dinner included crawfish tails a la cardinal, pommes de terre soufflés, and baked Alaska.

Swing by Antoine’s for dinner tonight and you can still find the pommes de terres soufflé (now anglicized as soufflé potatoes) and café brulot diabolique (chicory coffee with cinnamon, triple sec, and brandy, flamed tableside) served to the Disneys. The never-changing presence of those dishes reflects the longevity of the Creole restaurants which serve them, and their owners’ dedication to celebrating the hospitality that made them possible.

But there is one element of Antoine’s history that has faded from institutional memory. Our Antoine’s collection at the Historic New Orleans Collection also includes an undated menu with a photograph on the back of a Black woman standing in a courtyard behind the restaurant. There is no caption and no explanation for who she is or what she is doing. She stares directly into the camera, sleeves rolled up to mid-arm as if she had been stopped mid-task and summoned to pose, one hand resting on a piece of chicken wire that encircles a well.

The photograph of the unidentified woman on the archival Antoine’s menu points to the paradoxical centrality and invisibility of Black women to New Orleans foodways.

I go deep into our archives and then reach out to Antoine’s for an identification. None can be made. It is a genuine mystery, and I become slightly obsessed with the quest. I walk the block over to Antoine’s before lunch service one day, and the current general manager very kindly takes me outside and shows me the courtyard in the image. He points out where the well once stood. Where she once stood. The cheerful bustle of the busy restaurant and stream of workers hurrying back and forth across the courtyard seem to place it a thousand miles away from the placid scene on the menu. And yet, as we stand and stare across the yard, it looks somehow the same.

Now I knew something about the where of the photograph. But the questions of why and who—the pictured woman’s personal identity—remained when I walked back out on to St. Louis Street. Her presence on the menu points to the paradoxical centrality and invisibility of Black women in New Orleans culinary lore.

What was the purpose of the woman on the menu? Did diners just want or expect to see a Black woman in a French Quarter courtyard dressed as if just emerging from the restaurant’s kitchen? Exporting stories about New Orleans foodways framed around Black women is not new. And it clearly works.

A Tiana’s Bayou Adventure ride is also planned for Disneyland in California. Disneyland opened a Tiana’s Palace Restaurant in 2023 in the park’s New Orleans Square, already home to Blue Bayou Restaurant, Café Orleans, Royal Street Veranda, and Mint Julep Bar, all designed to give visitors a literal taste of our city.

At Tiana’s Palace, guests can order “7 Greens Gumbo.” Down here, it is known as gumbo z’herbes.

Lining up for a bowl of gumbo z’herbes on Holy Thursday at Dooky Chase’s is a New Orleans Easter tradition. I made my pilgrimage this year, wending my way slowly through the crush of a crowd that stood on North Miro Street, patiently and cheerfully waiting for the 2 p.m. lunch service to start.

When you finally make it to your table after countless stops along the way to greet friends, because everyone you know is somehow already there, you will get their famous fried chicken, of course. But the set menu starts with Chef Leah Chase’s Gumbo z’herbes: a gumbo traditionally prepared with five, seven, nine, or eleven kinds of greens. (The number must always be uneven.)

Tradition says if you eat this dish on Holy Thursday, you will gain as many new friends as there are greens in the gumbo. Disney went with lucky seven, but Leah Chase typically preferred to use a solid nine: mustards, collards, red Swiss chard, beet tops, cabbage, carrot tops, spinach, kale, and watercress.

The inside cover of the special Holy Thursday menu this year delivered the backstory. “This gumbo, like all others, was prepared with much labor and love,” it explained. “In times gone by, women could be seen with their knives and bags all along the neutral grounds digging up pepper grass, which had a lemony tart taste, to add to their gumbo.”

Like the anonymous Black woman standing in Antoine’s courtyard, these unidentified women with their knives and fragrant bags of pepper grass help imprint the seal of authentic New Orleans onto your meal.

It’s a powerful brand that more than matches that of Tiana. If only we could be assured that they also all got their happy endings and their own restaurants, bearing their own names.

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