Bona fide bites: the concentric authenticity of Boatwright’s Dining Hall

ABSTRACT At Walt Disney World’s Port Orleans Resort in Central Florida, the hotel’s restaurant, Boatwright’s Dining Hall, employs traditional southern and Louisiana cuisine to facilitate an immersive touristic experience inspired by the nineteenth-century US South. Opened in 1992, the restaurant and hotel present a romanticisation of the South embodied in foodways, architecture, and a fictional past that selectively sources the history of the region. Through the themed design principle of ‘concentricity’, the foodways of Boatwright’s Dining Hall operate in overlapping areas of cultural meaning to reciprocally authenticate the resort’s fabricated historical architecture and southern heritage in an idealised and immersive space known as a hyperreality. Named menu offerings at Boatwright’s Dining Hall connect the resort’s past and setting by memorialising the resort’s fictional founders and crafting associations with recreated southern spaces popularly connected to the region. As an authenticating experience, touristic consumption of food at Boatwright’s Dining Hall functions as a real and edible manifestation of a place-based commodified imagining of the nineteenth-century South, linking the dinner, restaurant, and hotel to a southern-inspired, fictional past and place, effectively displacing historic and present connections to the real US South.