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Dining & Spirits
Disney's New Taste of Tomorrow
 Herb-crusted seared ahi tuna at Disney’s new Wave restaurant, located in the Contemporary Resort |
Tomorrowland has fascinated us since long before Walt launched Disneyland in 1955. I always wondered what we’d eat in the future, and Walt Disney World in Orlando now serves a helping of brave new food at newly opened Wave — bold cooking for a health-conscious 21st century. Appropriately, the restaurant is on the ground floor of the Contemporary Resort, the emblematic, pyramid-shaped hotel that was a futuristic wow almost 40 years, ago, with a monorail flying through the lobby!
To enter Wave, you spiral through a Flash Gordon tunnel of chrome and neon into the bar and dining room — a landlocked, windowless space of throbbing cobalt on one side and dull earth-tone brown-on-brown on the other. There’s no green in sight, but the food is “all the good stuff,” as the waiter says: Organic, fresh, low-carb and diverse.
In theory, yes. Biodegradable straws are earth-friendly, and there are antioxidant martinis, gluten-free beer and Pyramid tea sachets (as seen on Oprah). Wrapping lamb and tiny bay scallops in lettuce and fresh herbs was perfect for me, robustly sauce- and bread-free. The kitchen stewed up corn and edamame into a grand, new-age succotash.
But the papaya slaw, borrowed from the Thais, lacked zing and crunch, and much of the rest had less. Avocado and citrus salad was limp; halibut was cooked perfectly but, like salmon, has a giant carbon footprint (if Mickey cares), and the grilled tofu club sandwich won’t excite either vegetarians or carnivores. And where’s the raw sugar?
This future is dreary to the eye. The plants and fish may have been cultivated in EPCOT, but the Wave feels very far from the farm or the fishing boats.
 Tamarind-glazed turkey skewer at Seasons 52 |
Florida has a better version of the Restaurant of Tomorrow in the Seasons 52 chain. Ironically, it has roots in the Contemporary too, in the resort’s signature California Grill. Six years ago, Darden Restaurants hired the Grill’s brains, chef Cliff Pleau and manager/wine wizard George Miliotes, to cook up a sibling for Red Lobster and Olive Garden.
They started with the requisite lean meats, whole grains and fresh fruits, vegetables and herbs, low-fat grilling and oven roasting. Then came the jazz of spices from the Pacific and the Mediterranean, a changing menu, clever wine-buying, exhibition kitchens and innovative flatbread pizzas and tiny desserts.
Seasons 52 does it for under 475 calories, hits price points south of $20 and packs in diners at seven locations from Boca to Buckhead. That’s a successful version of the near-term future. It buzzes while feeding the hunger for low fat, fresh and seasonal and invoking the romance of organic, sustainable, artisanal and local.
How we go back to the farm and rocket into the future at the same time will challenge restaurateurs and diners for years to come.
