Refreshment Corner
Refreshment Corner, also known as the Coca-Cola Refreshment Corner or simply Coke Corner, is a quick-service restaurant on Main Street, U.S.A. at Disneyland Park in Anaheim, California. Sponsored by Coca-Cola, it has stood at the end of Main Street, beside the central hub, since the park's opening day in 1955, serving hot dogs, chili and soft drinks to guests seated indoors and on a shaded patio. It is as well known for its live ragtime piano playing as for its food, a tradition stretching back to the park's earliest years.
History
Refreshment Corner opened with Disneyland on July 17, 1955, hosted by Coca-Cola, one of the park's original sponsors.[1] Coca-Cola's connection with Disney already ran through television sponsorship of The Mickey Mouse Club era programming, and the corner gave the company a permanent presence on Main Street, a short walk from the park entrance.[2] Singer Eddie Fisher, then the star of Coca-Cola's television variety hour, was among the celebrities on hand on opening day.
The shop proved durable enough to become a template: when Magic Kingdom opened in Florida in 1971, a similar Coca-Cola sponsored refreshment corner took the same position at the end of its Main Street — the location that later became Casey's Corner.[3] At Disneyland the original has survived every wave of Main Street remodelling with its role essentially unchanged, and Coca-Cola remains its host, with the company's signage worked into the building's turn-of-the-century storefront. In its early decades both Coke and Pepsi products were sold in the park; Coca-Cola later became Disney's sole soft-drink provider, a position it still holds.[3]
Setting
The restaurant occupies the last building on the west side of Main Street, at the corner where the street opens into the hub, next to the Candy Palace and a few steps from the Plaza Inn. Its cream-and-red Victorian frontage, striped awnings and Coca-Cola lettering make it one of the most photographed small buildings on the street. Inside is a small ordering and dining area; most guests carry their trays out to the patio, a shaded terrace of small tables at the street's end, well placed for watching parades pass and crowds drift toward the castle.
The patio holds the restaurant's second attraction: an upright piano. From the park's first years, a Coke Corner pianist was one of the few continuous sources of live entertainment on Main Street, alongside the Disneyland Band and the barbershop quartet, and guests were invited to gather round the piano for ragtime and honky-tonk favourites.[2]
The ragtime tradition
The best known of the corner's pianists was Rod Miller, who began playing at Refreshment Corner in 1969 and continued for more than three and a half decades, five days a week, becoming a Main Street institution in his own right.[1] Miller taught himself by slowing down player-piano rolls, developed a famously fast and flamboyant style, and wore out pianos at a remarkable rate over his career. With his student Alan Thompson he pioneered "four-handed" ragtime — two players at one keyboard — which became a signature of the corner.
Johnny Hodges carried the tradition alongside and after Miller, playing at the corner from 1981 into the 2000s, and a succession of later pianists, including Ragtime Robert, have kept scheduled sets at the patio piano, mixing Scott Joplin-style ragtime with Disney songs and requests.[2] Performance hours have been trimmed in recent years compared with the era when the piano played from morning until close to midnight, but a pianist at Coke Corner remains one of Disneyland's oldest living entertainment traditions.
Cuisine
The menu is deliberately simple American snack-bar food, and has been from the start: all-beef hot dogs — plain or with chili and cheese — chili served in a bread bowl, Mickey-shaped pretzels, chips and fountain Coca-Cola products, with cookies and other small sweets.[1] Disney's own description of the location pairs "crowd-pleasing eats like hot dogs, Mickey Mouse-shaped pretzels and hearty chili in bread bowls" with the ragtime piano on the patio. Limited-time hot dogs and seasonal drinks rotate through the menu, but the chili dog and a Coke at the end of Main Street is the combination the corner was built on in 1955.