Café Orleans
Café Orleans is a table-service restaurant in New Orleans Square at Disneyland Park in the Disneyland Resort, California. It opened with New Orleans Square on July 24, 1966, under the name Creole Café, and adopted its present name in 1972. Set on a shaded corner terrace overlooking the Rivers of America, it serves Cajun- and Creole-inspired food and is best known for the Monte Cristo sandwich.
History
New Orleans Square, dedicated by Walt Disney in July 1966, was the first new land added to Disneyland after opening day and the last dedication Disney attended at the park. The Creole Café was among its original dining locations, beginning as a counter-service café serving sandwiches, fritters and ice cream specialities.
Two fittings from the opening period survive in accounts of the restaurant and are still pointed out today. An antique espresso machine, bought by Walt and Lillian Disney in Italy, was installed in the café; Disney used it himself, and it remains on display inside. The ice cream counter was reportedly chosen by Disney with a design inspired by the film The Happiest Millionaire. Disney died in December 1966, a few months after the land opened, without seeing the café's later forms.
In 1972, under a sponsorship arrangement, the name changed to Café Orleans. Over the following decades the location moved back and forth between counter service and table service as menus and operators changed. In 2006 it settled into its present form as a full table-service restaurant, with a larger kitchen menu built around New Orleans cooking rather than the café fare of its early years.
Setting
Most seating is outdoors on a covered terrace at a corner of New Orleans Square, with a smaller indoor dining area. From the terrace, diners look across the walkway toward the Rivers of America, with views of passing river traffic and the Disneyland Railroad route beyond. The architecture follows the rest of the land: wrought-iron balconies, shuttered windows and pastel facades modelled on the French Quarter of New Orleans in the nineteenth century.
The restaurant stands a short walk from Pirates of the Caribbean, the Haunted Mansion and the Blue Bayou Restaurant, and forms part of a cluster of New Orleans Square dining that also includes quick-service locations serving gumbo, beignets and mint juleps.
Cuisine
The menu centres on Cajun and Creole dishes such as gumbo, shrimp and grits and spiced roasted chicken, alongside salads, crêpes in earlier eras, and seasoned pommes frites served with a Cajun remoulade, which developed their own following.
The signature item is the Monte Cristo: sliced turkey, ham and Swiss cheese layered in bread, coated in a light batter and fried, then dusted with powdered sugar and served with seasonal preserves. A three-cheese version without meat is also offered. The sandwich is a variation on the French croque-monsieur that became popular in Southern California restaurants in the 1950s, and it has been served in New Orleans Square since 1966, first at the Blue Bayou Restaurant before becoming a fixture here. Its combination of a savoury fried sandwich with sweet accompaniments has made it one of the most discussed individual dishes at the Disneyland Resort.