Disney Tips Your Guide To A Great Disney Vacation
Most people who do the International College Program at EPCOT go home afterward.
That is how the program is designed. Young people from the countries represented in World Showcase come to Walt Disney World for a few months, work in the pavilion that represents their home, and then return to finish school and build a life. It is a season, not a career path. The vast majority of participants leave with a good story and a few friendships and never work for Disney again.
Gerardo Quijada Gonzalez, who goes by Jerry, did the program at the Mexico Pavilion more than two decades ago.
He is now Chef de Cuisine at Be Our Guest Restaurant, which means he runs the kitchen inside Beast’s Castle at Magic Kingdom.
The path between those two facts is considerably harder than the version people usually tell about Disney dreams, and that is exactly why it is worth telling properly.
What Happened in Between His College Program
Jerry’s first experience at Walt Disney World was through the International College Program at EPCOT’s Mexico Pavilion, where he was inspired by Disney’s approach to storytelling, hospitality, and building memorable experiences.
Then he went home.
He finished college in Mexico and built a successful culinary career there. A real one, with stability. The idea of returning to Walt Disney World stayed with him, but it stayed with him from a distance, for years, while he did something else entirely.
Eventually, he and his family made the decision to leave that behind.
They packed their lives into four suitcases and moved to Central Florida.
The Part That Makes This an Honest Story
Here is the detail that separates this from the usual version of a Disney dream narrative.
He was not discovered. Nobody recruited him. There was no moment where someone recognized his talent and opened a door.
He submitted dozens of job applications over a span of years.
He officially joined Disney Culinary in 2016 as a sous chef.
That is the realistic shape of advancement inside a company this large. Persistence, repetition, and a lot of applications that went nowhere, followed by an entry point that was not the top.
Anyone reading this hoping to follow a similar path should sit with that part rather than the castle part.
Ten Years to the Top of a Kitchen
From that 2016 start, Jerry spent the next decade working across multiple Walt Disney World dining locations and helping launch new restaurant experiences while moving up through Disney’s culinary leadership.
Not a jump. A climb, one posting at a time, inside a culinary organization that operates hundreds of kitchens.
Today, he leads the one inside Beast’s Castle.
Why Be Our Guest Specifically Is a Hard Job
This is worth understanding because the role sounds romantic and the reality is operationally brutal.
Be Our Guest is among the highest-volume table service restaurants at Walt Disney World. It sits inside Magic Kingdom, the most visited theme park in the world, and it serves across multiple themed dining rooms including the Grand Ballroom, the West Wing, and the Rose Gallery.
It is also one of the most requested reservations on property, which means it runs near capacity essentially every operating day of the year.
Chef de Cuisine at a restaurant like that is not a prestigious posting where someone plates beautiful food for a quiet room. It is a logistics role with a culinary title attached, executing consistent output at enormous scale while the dining rooms are full of families who booked sixty days out and have very specific expectations.
His Leadership Philosophy Is the Actual Story
Here is the part that is genuinely unusual in a Disney context.
Rather than simply directing his team, Jerry encourages cast members to contribute their own ideas, techniques, and cultural traditions to the kitchen. He believes the best dining experiences come from people who feel connected to their work and have a real sense of ownership in what they create.
Think about what that means inside Disney’s operating model.
Disney culinary runs on consistency. The same dish has to come out the same way at the same quality across thousands of covers, because a guest who loved something in 2024 expects it identically in 2026. Standardization is not a limitation of the system, it is the point of the system.
Carving out room for individual contribution inside that structure is a deliberate choice, and not an easy one. It requires a leader who is willing to absorb the complexity of letting people bring something of their own into a process built for repeatability.
Where That Came From
Jerry traces it to his childhood in Mexico, where food was never only about what was on the plate.
Family meals brought people together. Recipes carried memories across generations. Cooking was how you demonstrated love and celebrated culture.
His mother was his greatest culinary influence, teaching him to cook while also teaching him why it mattered. Those lessons are what he is now trying to recreate in a professional kitchen, which is a harder translation than it sounds.
He also credits his wife, his children, fellow cast members, and Disney leaders for the path, and is direct about not having done it alone.
The Thematic Fit Is Almost Too Neat
Be Our Guest is a restaurant built around an invitation.
The story it draws from is about someone isolated who is transformed by learning to welcome other people. The entire premise of the place is hospitality as an act of generosity rather than transaction.
A chef whose stated philosophy is giving his team ownership and inviting them to bring themselves into the work is a reasonable person to be running that kitchen.
Why This Matters Beyond One Good Story
Moving up inside Disney is genuinely difficult. It is an enormous company with enormous internal competition, and plenty of talented cast members spend entire careers without reaching a role like this one.
What Jerry’s path actually demonstrates is not that the dream is easy. It is that the dream is reachable, over a long time, through a lot of rejection, usually by entering lower than you want to and climbing.
That is a less magical story than the one the castle setting suggests.
It is also considerably more useful.
Source: Disney’s profile of Chef de Cuisine Gerardo Quijada Gonzalez at Be Our Guest Restaurant.
