Eat Like Walt: Extra Helpings - Don DeFore's Silver Banjo Barbecue

In the history of Disneyland, precious few restaurants have displayed the name of someone other than Walt Disney (or one of his characters). To wit: Don DeFore’s Silver Banjo Barbecue. The eponymous restaurant opened on June 15, 1957, and was owned by the television actor best known for portraying neighbor Thorny on Ozzie and Harriet and boss man Mr. B. on Hazel.

The story begins in 1954, the year before Disneyland debuted. Walt had the big idea to produce the prestigious Emmy Awards show for its first-ever national broadcast. But actor and Academy of Television Arts president Don DeFore was way ahead of him and arranged for the awards to be broadcast on NBC in 1955.Walt wasn’t a sore loser. He invited Don to the studio; they toured the lot together and became fast friends. A few months later Don and his family were Walt’s special guests on Opening Day of Disneyland.

Fast-forward to 1957. The extremely popular Casa de Fritos moved across Frontierland (where Rancho Del Zocalo is now) and the small space they had occupied, adjacent to today’s River Belle Terrace, needed a new tenant.

Coincidentally, Don was developing a restaurant concept of his own, “Two weeks, night and day, I worked on the idea and plans; and then, as if my guardian angel had been working with me, I heard that there was going to be space available in Disneyland for someone to operate a barbecue restaurant. Negotiations were immediately started, and before long my brother Verne and I were welcomed into the Disneyland lessee family.”

That “guardian angel” would turn out to be Bud Coulson, Disneyland’s publicist and Don’s former colleague at the Academy of Television. He recalled Don worked as a cook in college and invited him to try a new role as restaurateur. Although Don dabbled in his dorm kitchen, he was not a chef. Without a signature sauce of his own, he arranged to buy barbecue sauce from Love’s, one of his favorite restaurants near his San Fernando Valley home in California. In the first week of Silver Banjo’s operation, the amount of sauce projected to last three days ran out in one. When it became obvious that Love’s could not meet the demand, Don had an ingenious idea. He took a bottle of sauce to the UCLA chemistry lab for analysis. They were able to break down the recipe and identify ingredients, but not the exact quantities. Enter Don’s wife, Marion DeFore. Working in her home kitchen, she blended and revised and taste-tested until she and her family agreed that she had hit upon a close version. But that was only half the solution; she was in no position to make enough sauce in her home. Don sent the recipe to Hunt’s to see if they could manufacture the sauce in quantity. They declined.

For several reasons, including the problematic sauce production, and after nearly five years of operation, fate was ultimately not in the chords for the humble homespun eatery - the final string was plucked on the Silver Banjo: It closed on March 4, 1962.

Jump ahead to 2015 and my first D23 Expo (now known as The Ultimate Disney Fan Event). I attended the Growing Up in Disneyland presentation by Don’s sons, Dave and Ron, (so named because Disneyland was their childhood playground during the “Banjo” days), held at the Walt Disney Archives Stage. In the midst of culinary research, I inquired about the recipe for the iconic barbecue sauce. Sigh. The brothers only had their mom’s handwritten home recipe and they didn’t think it tasted like the sauce they remembered. This prompted Dave to spring into action, creating his own test kitchen. After seven or eight attempts, he hit on a version that he and Ron agreed was very close to the sauce from their father’s Frontierland restaurant. The DeFore brothers then generously gifted me the unpublished family recipe exclusively for Eat Like Walt: The Wonderful World of Disney Food. Talk about being Pixie Dusted!!!

SILVER BANJO BARBECUE SAUCE

“Where there is a rib, there is a relative.”

Don DeFore

• Makes 3 quarts
• 6 cups (48 ounces) Hunt’s tomato sauce
• 1 ½ cups Heinz chili sauce (one 12-ounce bottle)
• 1 cup water (if needed, add more water to taste)
• ¾ cup Pompeian red wine vinegar
• ¼ cup Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce
• ¼ cup Kikkoman soy sauce
• ¾ cup (unsulfured) molasses, Grandma’s or Blackstrap molasses
• 2 ½ cups sugar (add more or less to taste)4 teaspoons Colman’s mustard powder
• 4 teaspoons McCormick celery seed (not celery salt)
• 1 teaspoon black pepper
• ½ teaspoon cinnamon
• ½ teaspoon dry garlic powder
• ½ teaspoon dry onion powder
• 1 teaspoon Colgin liquid hickory smoke (add more to taste, but be careful)

Combine all ingredients and simmer 2 to 3 hours, the longer the better. Barbecue sauce is best the next day.

If you are making ribs, please do not boil or steam them first. That removes the fat and all the flavor! Low and slow is the way to go. While assembling the sauce, I suggest listening to the banjo stylings of former Disneyland Cast Member + Disney Legend Steve Martin and his band, the Steep Canyon Rangers.