Jiko – The Cooking Place
Jiko – The Cooking Place is a signature table-service restaurant in Jambo House at Disney's Animal Kingdom Lodge at Walt Disney World. It serves dinner only, cooking that draws on African cuisines and the flavours that have travelled to and from the continent — Mediterranean, Indian and European influences among them — around an open kitchen built on twin wood-burning ovens. Jiko means a cooking place in Swahili, which gives the restaurant its subtitle. Jiko is the Lodge's fine-dining restaurant and has long been counted among the best-regarded restaurants at Walt Disney World.
History
Jiko opened on 16 April 2001 with Disney's Animal Kingdom Lodge, as the resort's premier dining experience alongside the buffet restaurant Boma – Flavors of Africa. Where Boma was designed for families and volume, Jiko was designed as a slower, dinner-only room of about 235 seats, and it was given the resort's beverage programme to build as well — a serious undertaking, because the plan centred on South African wine at a time when few American restaurants listed it in depth.
That wine programme drew attention from the restaurant's earliest days. Contemporary reports in 2001 described Jiko's cellar as the largest collection of South African wines in the hemisphere, and the Lodge has since often been described as holding one of the largest collections of South African wines in the United States. South Africa has made wine for more than three centuries, and the list was built to introduce diners to both classic varieties and pinotage, the country's own cross of pinot noir and cinsault. Jiko has held the AAA Four Diamond Award, and it remained a signature restaurant — with the dress expectations that status carries at Walt Disney World — through the resort's 2020 closure and subsequent reopening.
Setting
The interior, designed by Jeffrey Beers International, evokes sunset on the savanna. The palette runs through earth tones, golds and warm reds, and a large wall of colour behind the dining room shifts slowly in tone, suggesting changing light. Stylised white birds are suspended from the ceiling, a motif drawn from African art and from the design language of The Lion King, which informed parts of the room. Pillars and details pick up the colours and patterns of African textiles and craft.
At the centre is the cooking place itself: an open kitchen surrounded by the dining room, its focal point the twin wood-burning ovens, fired for flatbreads and roasted dishes in view of guests, with counter seating nearby. To one side, the glass-walled Cape Town Wine Room provides private dining for up to about forty guests among wine-themed sculpture and the collection itself, and the adjacent Cape Town Lounge serves African wines by the glass before and after dinner.
Cuisine
Jiko's cooking is contemporary rather than a recreation of any single national cuisine. Menus change seasonally, but the structure is consistent: flatbreads and dips from the wood-burning ovens to begin, appetisers that might include wild boar tenderloin or maize-and-sweet-potato tamales, and main courses built around spice blends and techniques from across the continent — berbere-braised lamb, Durban-style shrimp curry, chermoula-roasted chicken and oak-grilled fillet among the dishes most associated with the restaurant over the years. Seafood, game and a considered vegetarian and vegan offer have always featured, reflecting the Mediterranean and Indian influences that are part of the concept rather than additions to it.
The wine list remains the other half of the experience. It is led by South African vintages, offered extensively by the glass as well as the bottle so that diners unfamiliar with the regions can taste comparatively, and staff are trained to pair them with the spiced cooking — the pairing problem the original programme set out to solve.