Ratatouille is my favorite Pixar movie. I’m going to make a statement that’s going to make a lot of you dislike me, and that’s okay – we aren’t all going to always see eye to eye on everything. I am not the biggest Pixar fan in the world. I think that DISNEY movies are magical, immersive, and full of wondrous storytelling and fantastic songs that almost always end up becoming classics in their own rights. For me, personally, Pixar movies just fall a little short of that magic. It’s not that I don’t usually like that movie, or think it’s bad, it just doesn’t have that special something that makes Disney magical to me. Ratatouille is the exception to this rule.
This is why I knew, when visiting Disneyland Paris, that we had to eat at the new(ish) Bistro Chez Remy in the new(ish) Ratatouille Miniland in the Walt Disney Studios Park. The restaurant is elaborately themed, and meant to look like the tiny restaurant that Remy starts at the end of Ratatouille. The restaurant nails the look, as you actually feel like you’re shrinking down to the size of a mouse, and stepping into a movie. When Disney is firing on all cylinders, this is what they do best – create magical moments where you can step inside your favorite moments of your favorite movies. Good examples of this is walking into Cars Land in California, or the Be Our Guest Ballroom in The Magic Kingdom – you feel like you’re in the movie. Chez Remy hits this feeling out of the park as well.
The menu as Chezy Remy is a prix fixe, with different options you can chose from on the prix fixe, and different levels (and price points) of prix fixe you can chose. David and I ordered an Remy menu, and a Linguini menu. The two appetizers we got where a house salad (standard to all Remy menu’s), and a duck foie gras. For our entrees with selected the fillet of beef with premium ratatouille, and the roasted cod with (normal) ratatouille.
Everything came out looking great, but tasting average. It wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t wow. And at wow price points, we were expecting wow. We weren’t upset necessarily, because of how great the experience was, to be eating in such a cool restaurant (and because we had been warned about the food at DIsneyland Paris!), but we were miffed. We’ve had some of the best meals of our lives in France, and some of the best meals of our lives at Disney Parks – we feel like the combination of those two, should be producing the BEST theme park food in the world. Chez Remy, in our opinion, is still a good option at Disneyland Paris, because there aren’t many good options, But the food is not living up to the price points, and considering they’re in the food capital of the world, they need to be.
