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Our waitress didn’t know what file is.

Most people don’t. It happens to be a crucial spice in file gumbo, the national dish of Cajun Louisiana. File is ground sassafrass leaves; it lends a redolent, musky aroma to gumbo, gives it a sage color, and thickens it slightly. It’s even in the lyrics to Hank Williams’ famed song, where he syncopates his affection for jambalaya, and a crawfish pie, file gumbo. No, he’s not saying “filet” gumbo.

The miraculous denouement is that, no matter the knowledge level of our waitress, the file gumbo at the Café Orleans restaurant in Disneyland® had actual file in it. Yes, that Disneyland. By the quickest road, it’s 1,747 miles from the heart of gumbo country in Lafayette, La., to New Orleans Square in the Mouse Kingdom.

I have to admit, I was surprised. I grew up in Louisiana and never expected to find authentic gumbo at Disneyland, but the world’s best-known theme park is an artful mix of authentic and fantastic that extends from the top of the Matterhorn to the soup dishes at its restaurants.

I think that’s what makes it so appealing to adults. If you are watching, say, Teletubbies, it is completely removed from all earthly reality, and while tots love it, adults can only gape at the screen. But Disneyland’s genius is in the way fantastic and authentic blend. The Matterhorn isn’t the real Matterhorn (duh, my stepdaughter would say), but the gumbo is the real article.

So is the pineapple smoothie at the Tiki Juice Bar. No corn syrup, no gum arabic, carrageenan or butylated hydroxytoluene. Just pineapple stuff, whirred up. Never mind that the birds inside the Tiki Room are so wholly artificial that they wouldn’t fool a Teletubby. The artifice is key to their charm; one sits beneath these warbling “parrots” with equal parts irony and wonder. The Tiki birds are so old (40 years) that Disney had to make up a word, audio-animatronic, to describe them, since “automatic singing puppets” would have been clunky; if only more modern confabulations were rooted in such blissful irreality. Compare the moniker for these performing birds to “blogging,” which sounds like something you do with mallets inside burlap sacks.

One must practice that old willing suspension of disbelief to enjoy the Tiki birds, which I’ve no trouble doing. On reflection, between the singing-dancing parrots, the gumbo, the heritage jazz band (as good as any in New Orleans), the walking, talking trash cans (audio-animatronic?), the orange-blossom scent in California Adventure, the armies of little girls in princess costumes, it becomes clear to thinking adults that this is the world capital of down-to-earth, make-something-of-it fantasy.

Who would ever expect the gumbo in a theme park to be authentic? Huck Finn’s Island doesn’t resemble any such islet in the Mississippi—but it seems exactly like my boyhood daydreams of what such a place would be.

The workers at Boudin Bakery on Pacific Wharf are hauling real sourdough loaves out of their ovens as I walk by, which is more than I can say for some grocery-store bakeries in Seattle. And, in a flowerbed near Downtown Disney, an enterprising sparrow next to a golden horse is hauling a dead weed up to its nest in an archway.

I imagine Salvador Dali would have delighted in the surreal beauty of that tableau. I didn’t explain about file to the server in Café Orleans. Disneyland is no place for extraneous explanation. Just taste whatever comes.

Eric Lucas lives in Seattle.