The Hollywood Brown Derby
The Hollywood Brown Derby is a signature table-service restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard at Disney's Hollywood Studios at Walt Disney World. It is a licensed replica of the Hollywood Brown Derby in Los Angeles, one of the most famous restaurants of Hollywood's golden age, and it opened with the park — then called Disney-MGM Studios — on May 1, 1989.[1] It serves the two dishes the original made famous, the Cobb salad and the grapefruit cake, in a dining room modelled on the original's teak-and-mahogany interior.
History
The original Brown Derby began on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles in 1926, in a building shaped like a derby hat. The location the Disney restaurant recreates is the second Derby, which opened on Valentine's Day 1929 on North Vine Street in Hollywood, near the studios and broadcasters of the day. Under owner Robert H. Cobb, who took over in the 1930s, it became a working canteen for the film industry: a place where stars ate in view of the room, deals were made in the booths, and caricatures of famous regulars lined the walls above the seats they favoured.
The Hollywood location closed in 1985, in the face of lease and earthquake-safety problems, and was damaged by fire in 1987.[2] In 1987, two years before the Florida park opened, the Brown Derby began a licensing programme with the Walt Disney Company for a replica at the new studio park in Orlando.[3]
The Hollywood Brown Derby opened at Disney-MGM Studios on May 1, 1989, and has remained the park's flagship restaurant through the park's renaming to Disney's Hollywood Studios in 2008 and its later reinventions. Unlike much of the opening-day park, it has stayed largely unchanged in appearance and purpose, continuing to operate as a full table-service restaurant, with an outdoor lounge added as a more casual, first-come alternative for drinks and a reduced menu.
Setting
The restaurant stands on Hollywood Boulevard, a short walk from the park entrance, its Spanish Revival exterior echoing the Vine Street original rather than the hat-shaped Wilshire building. Inside, the room works to recreate the original's atmosphere: dark wood, booths around the walls, chandeliers, and copies of the celebrity caricatures that covered the walls in Hollywood. The earliest originals were drawn from 1931 by Eddie Vitch, initially in exchange for meals, and the caricature wall became the Derby's signature — to be drawn was a mark of arrival. The Florida walls carry reproductions in the same spirit, alongside brass derby details and period memorabilia. A private room, the Bamboo Room, recalls a space at the original.
The effect aimed for is deliberate contrast with the rest of the park: low light, white tablecloths and unhurried service, in the style of a 1930s Hollywood institution rather than a theme-park restaurant.
Cuisine
Two dishes anchor the menu, both inherited directly from the original under the licensing arrangement, and both are still presented as made to the original recipes.
The Cobb salad is the restaurant's best-known dish, in Florida as it was in Hollywood. The usual account dates it to 1937, when Robert Cobb, working late, chopped together what he found in the kitchen — greens, chicken, bacon, egg, tomato, avocado, cheese and chives — in the restaurant's French dressing, first for theatre owner Sid Grauman, who returned the next day and ordered it by name. At Disney's version the finely chopped salad is tossed tableside and remains the most popular entrée.
The grapefruit cake is the signature dessert, and has been on the Florida menu since the restaurant opened in 1989.[4] It is a light chiffon cake layered with grapefruit sections and grapefruit cream-cheese icing, devised at the original, by the standard account, for gossip columnist Louella Parsons, who had asked for a dessert that fitted her diet.[5]
Around those two fixtures the kitchen serves contemporary American fine dining — steaks, seafood and seasonal starters — at signature-restaurant level, with a substantial wine list. The lounge outside serves the Cobb salad and grapefruit cake alongside cocktails for guests without a reservation.
See also
References
- ↑ https://d23.com/a-to-z/hollywood-brown-derby-the/hollywood-brown-derby-1180w-600h/
- ↑ https://www.micechat.com/77107-disney-hollywood-studios-brown-derby/
- ↑ https://www.thedailymeal.com/1306026/classic-cobb-salad-improvised-origin/
- ↑ https://disneyparksblog.com/wdw/2-classic-recipes-for-disneys-hollywood-studios-35th-anniversary/
- ↑ https://www.thedailymeal.com/1306026/classic-cobb-salad-improvised-origin/