Scott Joseph at the Orlando Restaurant Guide has one of the first actual signals of change occurring at Disney’s executive level. In this case it’s Dieter Hannig, who was the Vice President of the Food & Beverage Division.
Dieter Hannig, who is credited with changing the face of restaurants and dining at Walt Disney World as the vice president of the food and beverage division, has announced he is leaving the company. Hannig is one of the executives who stepped forward to volunteer for a buyout package from Disney.
Hannig didn’t just change dining at Disney, his approach helped elevate the quality of other restaurants throughout Central Florida.
You can trace the renaissance back to about 1992 when Hannig did something revolutionary for a corporation the size of Walt Disney World: he allowed the executive chefs and general managers at Disney’s top-tier dining establishments to run the restaurants as if they owned them.
“It really opened the doors to allow us to be more creative and be more competitive,” Scott Hunnel, executive chef at Victoria & Albert’s, said last year, “not just in Orlando but with the rest of the country and the rest of the world.”
Read the rest at Joseph’s excellent blog.