Chef Zach discusses how City Works is redefining Disney Springs dining with fresh flavors, rotating specials, and guest-favorite dishes.

We had the honor to speak with Zachary Van Gaasbeek, Vice President of Food and Beverage for Bottleneck Management, the restaurant group behind eight unique brands across the U.S., including the popular City Works Eatery & Pour House, located at Disney Springs in Walt Disney World. We discussed City Works Eatery & Pour House and Disney Springs dining.

From Dishwasher to Executive Chef

Chef Zach’s culinary journey began in New York, starting humbly as a dishwasher at a local country club. His passion for hospitality and food led him to attend the prestigious Culinary Institute of America (CIA) in Hyde Park, where he earned degrees in hospitality management and culinary arts. After graduation, Zach traveled the U.S., working in places like Naples, FL, Sonoma, CA, and Raleigh, NC, before settling in Chicago, where he became a corporate chef for Francesca’s Restaurant Group. He leads food and beverage strategy at Bottleneck Management.

Disney Springs Dining: City Works Eatery & Pour House

City Works Eatery & Pour House unveiled the current Chef Selects Menu on May 21. These limited-time menu items hang around for eight weeks adding some culture to Disney Springs dining. Additionally, the main City Works eatery & Pour House menu received an overhaul. With that menu update, around 17 new items arrived, ranging from burgers and flatbreads to bowl-style entrees and more. During our opportunity to speak with Chef Zach, we asked about these new menu items and other aspects of being a chef with Bottleneck Restaurants.

Interview with Chef Zachary Van Gaasbeek 

An edited version of our interview with Chef Zach is available below. We discuss new menu items, his love of being a chef, and the culinary process.

Question: “Chef Zach, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and why you’re a chef?”

Answer: “Yeah, my first job was as a dishwasher at a local country club. That’s where I really kind of fell in love with the hospitality industry, the culture in the heart of the house. And I just worked my way up through the ranks and haven’t looked back since. You know, I went to the culinary school of the CIA in Hyde Park, New York. And there I actually met my wife. And from there, we’ve traveled around the US, lived in Southwest Florida, out in the wine country of Sonoma, California, over to Raleigh, North Carolina, and then finally ending up in Chicago, Illinois.”

Question: “What is it about being a chef that you love so much? Or why did you become a chef?

Answer” “Yeah, the best part about being a chef is just creating experiences and connections through food. There’s immense joy in seeing somebody else’s face light up when they taste your dish and have what you’ve created.
Being a chef also means, I’m constantly learning new ingredients, techniques, trends, which keeps the job super exciting. I just love somebody just saying, Oh, this, dish is fantastic. I mean, it just kind of makes my day.”

Disney Springs Dining: City Works’ Menus

Question: “Chef Zach, in designing menus, you’re designing menus for lots of different restaurants, not just City Works, but we’re concerned obviously for City Works Eatery & Pour House. What does it feel like to design menus? Because you’re designing menus for locations across the nation.”

Answer: “What I’ve learned is obviously everyone’s taste preferences are different. And that’s what I really love about what City Works is. We’re not bound to certain dishes like other concepts like an Italian restaurant or a steak house. We get to create pastas, tacos, burgers, flatbreads, elevated entrees, and twists on comfort food. It’s those numerous styles of dishes that can really please any palate. Whether, you’re at a long day at the parks and your family can’t decide whether you want Italian, whatever it may be, we’re kind of a one-stop shop.”

Disney Springs Dining: Designing Menus for Diverse Locations

Question: “How do you design menus for diverse places that people eat in Chicago, theme park people in California, Pennsylvania, and Texas? You have all City Works locations in all of those places. For example, City Works offers a certain number of barbecue elements on the menu. One of the easiest ways to get in trouble is to serve someone North Carolina barbecue when they expect Texas barbecue. How do you balance that and all the flavors?”

Answer: “So, no matter where you’re visiting us from, there’s still something on the menu that you’ll feel familiar and exciting. Then we just make sure that we have a local connection, whether it’s, from our 90 beers on tap or our 30 coming from local breweries. We kind of hit, we hit all bases.”

Disney Springs Dining: Keeping Quality High with a Diverse Menu

Question: “I think City Works does a solid job with that, which does lead to my one, semi gotcha question.. Because this is what people who do what I do, reviewing food, restaurants, trying to point people in right direction. We are famous for saying don’t order the chicken from the steak place, don’t order the seafood from the chicken place. But at City Works, you have a new menu.

I’ve tried some of the new items already. I’m going to try some more in a couple of days from the time we do this interview. You’ve got tacos, you’ve got burgers, you’ve got flatbreads, you’ve got pastas, you’ve got barbecue, however you define barbecue, but you’ve got it. You’ve added bowl items with this new menu, which caught me off guard when I first saw that. How do you keep all that together and keep the quality up? How do you balance that?”

Answer: “Yeah, that’s a great question. Even with a diverse menu, we maintain high service quality by streamlining our kitchen operations and cross-training our staff, utilizing many of our products effectively. Everything just flows efficiently, no matter what’s being ordered.”

At this point, we bantered a little about City Works Eatery & Pour House’s newer menu items. Chef Zach mentioned that the most popular item on the menu currently nationwide is the new Tex-Mex Protein Bowl. Afterward, we returned to a more question-and-answer format.

New Items

Question: “What inspires you when you come up with new menu items? This is the peril of introducing new menu items. Whenever you add new menu items, which is necessary for restaurants, you have to get rid of some existingmenu items. Recently, City Works eliminated certain menu items. What inspires you to add things? What inspires you and your team to make those menu changes?”

Answer: “Well, really anything and everything inspires us. My favorite days are kind of brainstorming some ideas with a lot of my chefs and turning those ideas into reality. We do research trends, but we also try to set some trends as well. City Works is American food with a twist, and the twist is by far the best part. You know, our smoked meatloaf entree, anybody can go into a restaurant and just get a classic meatloaf. Our smoked meatloaf with the maple bourbon glaze is just phenomenal and twisted in just the right way that really fits with our concept.”

Disney Springs Dining: Innovation Through Chef Selects Menu

Question: “The latest Chef Select Menu came out last week. What inspired you to start the Chef Select Menu because it rotates every eight weeks or so?”

Answer: “The Chef Selects Menu is inspired by global flavors. As you can see with like the Korean cauliflower that’s on the Chef Selects right now, or even what we had on previously with crab rangoon, mozzarella sticks. So, those global flavors and trending food items, we rotate them, bi-monthly to keep things fresh and exciting and give our guests something new to try. Additionally, it’s a great testing ground for us as well. We can see, using Smash Burger Tacos as the example, those sold like hotcakes. So, we were like, there’s obviously a market for this. We’re executing them extremely well. Let’s put them on the menu and, keep our guests happy.”

Disney Springs Dining: Why Two Months?

Question: “What was the idea with every two months? Lots of restaurants at Disney Springs have monthkly rotating menu, so why every eight weeks?”

Answer: “We went for a little bit of a longer time because, even some of your best guests come in once, maybe twice a month. So if you’re getting one of our limited-time offerings and you come in and you were to get the smash burger tacos, for example, but when you come back in a few weeks later and they’re gone already, it lowers the guest experience. People are going to want to try that dish quite a few times. But also, we do have numerous offerings. So that gives our guests the opportunity to try something new every time that they’re in.”

We concluded the interview with a discussion of dining options at Disney Springs. Additionally, we discussed Chef Zach traveling to the various City Works Eatery & Pour House locations, including the one at Disney Springs. We would also like to express our gratitude to Chef Zach and the entire Bottleneck Management team for their time.

For more theme park-related news and information, visit MSM News. Also, do not forget about our noon (Eastern Time) weekday theme park dining reviews. As always, eat like you mean it!

Expertise. Ease. Value.

Ready for your bucket list trip? Our trusted partner, MEI-Travel, will handle the planning so you can focus on the memories. They offer free vacation planning services and have nearly 20 years of experience creating memorable vacations. 

Contact us today for a fee-free, no-obligation quote.