Disney Launches Wine With New Film “Ratatouille”

Move over Sideways and A Good Year - Disney is using its new animated feature film Ratatouille to launch an innovative new range of food, including wine, cheese and yoghurt. Disney will offer red and white wines to compliment the film's backdrop (a five-star Parisian restaurant) from Costco Wholesale Corp. Carrefour will carry Ratatouille-branded water, tomato sauces, milk, cheese and yogurt.

Ratatouille is the 8th animated feature film produced by Pixar (which is owned by Disney) and it tells the story of Remy (voiced by Patton Oswalt), a rat living in Paris who wants to be a chef. It opens on June 29th in the USA.

While earlier Pixar projects cantered on child-friendly subjects like bugs and monsters, this one takes viewers deep into the world of French haute cuisine. Remy, a food-obsessed rat with an exceptional sense of smell, dreams of becoming a chef. His innate ability to smell ingredients in food is unappreciated by the pack, who use him as poison sniffer.

To achieve his dream Remy teams up with Linguini, a clueless garbage boy at Gusteau’s, a once-great Parisian restaurant that has fallen into disarray since the death of its chef, Auguste Gusteau. Remy teaches the lowly kitchen worker to cook dishes that impress even the powerful food critic Anton Ego, who is given voice by the actor Peter O’Toole.

I’m not going to spoil the plot for you but it sounds superb! Ratatouille is getting rave reviews and I am looking forward to taking Rosie and Katie to see it – it’s one of the joys of being a Dad!

The Pixar crew took cooking classes, ate at notable restaurants in Paris and worked alongside Mr. Keller at the French Laundry in Yountville, California.

“As a former actor and dancer, I have spent a lot of time in restaurants, but I had no idea of that vast difference between France and America, and especially the three-star restaurants in Paris,” said Brad Lewis, the producer.

The spectacle of French service was of particular note, and the film’s examination of how it can fade was influenced by studying La Tour d’Argent, a centuries-old Paris restaurant that lost two of its three Michelin stars. The cheese course in the film is copied directly from the one at the Parisian restaurant Hélène Darroze.

Gusteau’s is an amalgam of several restaurants in Paris, including Guy Savoy, Le Train Bleu and Taillevent. At a staff meeting at Taillevent, Mr. Lewis finally understood the intensity of high-level service.

“They had recorded that one woman took 10 minutes between her first sip of white Burgundy and her second,” he said. “So they concluded that the wine was too cold and were going to adjust accordingly.”

The intricacies of wine service in the movie are but one detail dedicated eaters will appreciate. The curve of the copper-bottomed sauce pans, the steam from a pot of soup or even the way slices of leek fall off a knife are expertly rendered.

I’d love to send the Head Waiter and his staff at the Four Seasons Restaurant (www.fourseasonsrestaurant.com) in New York to watch the film – they may pick up some good tips on service and learn how to treat their customers! Check out customers comments on their service at http://nymag.com/listings/restaurant/the-four-seasons-restaurant/

The team at Pixar worked with Mr. Keller and other chefs to create a menu for the restaurant. Michael Warch, manager of the film’s sets and layout department, also holds a culinary degree. He used the kitchens at the Pixar studios in the San Francisco Bay Area to recreate dishes for the animators to study.

Throughout the film, the characters work on dishes like steamed pike with butter, braised fennel and heirloom potatoes or grilled petit filet mignon with oxtail and baby onion ragout topped with truffled bordelaise and shaved Perigord truffle. The idea was to create food so authentic that people would leave the theatre with an urge to cook, eat and drink – sounds good to me!

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