Five minute chef: Lenny DeGeorge, Walt Disney Parks There's definitely a magic to it. When you get to design a facility that will feed up to 5,000 guests a day and you know that all the time you spend on it will be responsible for a lot of smiling faces, its pretty amazing. How do you plan your menus? It all depends on exactly what the restaurant concept is. So if it's Italian you have to distinguish between Italian-American, northern Italian or southern Italian when planning the cuisine. Any Walt Disney restaurant will always have a background story. For instance when we opened 'Be Our Guest' in the Magic Kingdom, which was based around the story of Beauty and the Beast, we wanted to do French cuisine. But we had to balance that against the fact that it would be eaten by a mostly American palate, so we had to make sure we chose French dishes they would love. Is the food actually authentic then? When you go to any of the themed restaurants in the Epcot theme park in Florida, the people serving you are actually residents of the country where the theme comes from. They come over on visas and have a great pride in what they do. When we start a new restaurant, we begin our research really far out. When we opened some African restaurants, for example, about 10 years ago, not much was known about their cuisine so we travelled to each country, did a lot of research and picked the brains of cast members who came from those lands to ensure our dishes were the real thing. Personal favourite food? I like a bit of everything. My heritage is Italian-American so I grew up with those comfort foods. Ingredient you'd abolish? Anchovies. But I'd still probably eat them in Vietnamese or Thai cuisine. Over 55 million meals are served in the Disney parks each year. Over 25 tons of fruits and vegetables are grown annually on-site and served in Walt Disney World park restaurants. More than 4,500,000 pounds of apples, bananas, and grapes are consumed by guests each year. If laid end-to-end, this would stretch for nearly 889 miles. If you stacked all the apples eaten in a year at Walt Disney World on top of the other, they would reach the height of 3,420 Cinderella Castles. The juice from the grapes consumed annually at Walt Disney World Resort is enough to fill two full-sized swimming pools. The amount of tomatoes used in one year at Walt Disney World Resort could supply the annual La Tomatina Tomato Fight in Spain for the next 38 years. Walt Disney World calibrates the water used to make the dough for its pizza bases specifically to the pH found in Naples, to ensure that its pizzas have an authentic Italian taste. Walt Disney World Resort Florida is currently offering visitors the chance to dine for free for their entire stay at hundreds of restaurants across the six parks for those booking a holiday before 5 November 2013. For more information visit Disney Packages. Terms and conditions apply.