Wine Country Trattoria

For years, cost-cutting and homogenization undermined even the better restaurants at Disney’s theme parks, leaving foodies wondering whether their meals would be merely overpriced or both expensive and mediocre. Today, there’s no simple and accurate way to sum up Disney’s overall dining options in Anaheim, though the 2024 openings of Din Tai Fung and Paseo in Downtown Disney signaled a renewed corporate interest in proven quality, prices be damned. Wine Country Trattoria – also known as Wine Country Trattoria at the Golden Winery – sits somewhere in the middle of Disney’s current portfolio.

Located in Anaheim’s Disney California Adventure theme park, Wine Country Trattoria is a patio restaurant that overlooks Pixar Pier, including the iconic, Mickey-faced eccentric Ferris wheel called Pixar Pal-a-Round. Unlike the surprisingly international Carthay Circle Restaurant, Wine Country Trattoria offers a single-page menu with basic Italian-American fare: minestrone soup, fried calamari, spaghetti with olive oil or bolognese sauces, chicken parmesan, salmon, and several salads, plus a single page of cocktails, sangrias, and beers. Guests can also choose from a wine list with roughly 30 options, which given the restaurant’s theme is atypically undersold during the ordering process.

Although “surprisingly good” isn’t normally a compliment, it’s the right way to describe everything we ordered on our visit. The highlight of our meal was a generously sized ribeye steak with a wonderfully peppered porcini mushroom demi-glace – sous vide-level tender at medium rare, oddly laid atop a bed of tasty garlic/mascarpone mashed potatoes, baby carrots, and pearl onions. A shrimp alfredo pasta was also atypically large, though obviously far more starch than protein, and pretty good, while our only complaint about the fried calamari (served with green beans and a pepperoncini alioi dip) was that our group devoured it quickly enough to order a second – even taking Disney and inflation modifiers into account, the squid appetizer’s portion size didn’t match its $14 price as well as the $39 steak or $31 alfredo.