Pokémon Food at Theme Parks - My Top Five Wishlist

With the recent opening of the beautiful PokéPark Kanto, and Universal Studios announcing a new Pokémon project in Japan (with ‘the company’s global footprint’ to follow), this seems like the perfect time to talk about the kind of themed dining I would love to see at a Pokémon theme park!

Honestly, words cannot express how much I want to visit this place. Image Credit: Official cover art for PokéPark kanto

Sure, PokéPark looks to have a cute selection of drinks and snacks, similar to the offerings available at the Pokemon Café in Tokyo or Pikachu Sweets, which look great but if we’re going for full immersion (think drinking Butterbeer in Hogsmeade), I want something more.

The Pokémon world is home to all sorts of culinary creations, from the humble Ragecandybar through to the weird and wonderful curries of Galar, but which ones make my top five list of things I’d like to see at a park? If you’re reading this Universal, take notes!

In no particular order, let’s begin!

Local Specialties

Each region of the Pokémon world has its own signature snack, and I want to try them all – Eating Around the World style.

Imagine a Pokémon food festival where each region has its own pavilion dedicated to showing off its regional specialty. I could take a leisurely stroll to Kanto for some Pewter Crunchies, to Unova for a Casteliacone, before finishing it off with Alola’s famous Big Malasadas.

Tell me you wouldn't love to snack on that Casteliacone.

Most of these shouldn’t be too difficult to create in the real world either. The Casteliacone is just a soft-serve ice cream, the Shalour Sable and Lava Cookie are different types of biscuit, the Big Malasada has an IRL counterpart in the Portuguese Malassadas… You get where I’m going with this. The regional specialities would be an easy win for immersive food, and some of them have even already been sold as edible products – even the suspicious sounding Old Gateau! So, please give me an EPCOT style Pokémon Food Festival.

Bonus points if the Kalos pavilion is styled after one of Lumiose’s famous cafes. I would love to sit down at a table with some cute Pokémon for company! Anybody fancy an Ember Roast to go with their croissant?

Curry

For those of you unfamiliar with Pokémon Sword and Shield, the region of Galar is famous for its curry.

Not sure I'd call this a classic, but you do you Galar.

The region itself is based on good ol’ Blighty, where the Pokémon Centres look like pubs and we all love a good chicken tikka masala. So, of course trainers can cook up all manner of weird and wonderful curries to share with their beloved Pokémon. Simply pitch up your camp, pick some ingredients and get cooking!

While in the game you spend your time out in the wild chowing down on curry, in a park, I’d love to see a Galarian curry spot. Have the chef be a seasoned trainer from Galar who is well versed in the camping and curry life. The inside of this restaurant could still be themed around camping and picnics, but instead of making yourself, you can get proper table service. The only question would be which of Galar’s famous curries would make it to the menu?

Some of the curries you can make are pretty tame and would translate well onto a restaurant menu, like the Mushroom Medley Curry, the Plenty of Potato Curry or even the Fried-Food Curry. Though I’m not sure how many chefs would want to take on the task of making the Whipped-Cream or Smoked-Tail curries into something more appealing!  But hey, if someone makes it, I’ll give it a try!

Donuts

Yes, I am aware that Pikachu Sweets in Tokyo is already serving up Legends Z-A inspired donuts, but I’ve heard mixed reviews and it’s not quite the full Ansha’s Donut Shop experience.

Look at how pretty her donuts can be!

Picture this: Diantha has returned from her latest movie shoot to learn of her daughter’s pop-up donut shop in Lumiose City. Noticing Ansha’s talent, she quickly sets up a proper, brick and mortar shop for her little girl. And we get to benefit from the new Ansha’s Donuts location!

I’d love a full, Lumiose inspired café with a huge selection of donuts to choose from and maybe with a collaboration with Team Flare Nouveau to provide some excellent hot drinks to go with the tasty treats. Plus, thanks to her time with Team MZ, perhaps Ansha has come up with new flavours based on some of Lumiose’s finest residents. I know I’d love to see a Corbeau or a Canari-inspired donut!

In terms of the actual donuts from the game, we’ve already seen the ‘Old-Fashioned Donuts’ appear in the real world – styled after Groudon, Kyogre and Rayquaza. But it’d be amazing if we could add the Bad Dreams Cruller and Plasma-Glazed Donut to the list. Even some of the non-specific recipes look incredible. Start getting to the top tier recipes and Ansha has really upped her decoration game. I’ll take a Pecha Meringue Donut please!

Now, obviously we don’t have the Pokémon berries here in our world, but it’d be so much fun trying to match various berries to their real-world fruit counterparts and coming up with donut recipes from there! We just need some adventurous bakers!

Sandwiches

Similar to the curries of Galar, Paldea is known for its array of sandwiches.

This is arguably the easiest option to turn into a real-world equivalent but let it be known that there are some wacky sandwiches available in this region.

I mean really, who wouldn't want an open sandwich of onions, tortilla and potato salad on a bed of cheese?

There are two ways you could do this in a park, but in my opinion they should both be themed around ‘Every Wich Way’ – Paldea’s version of Subway. The easy way of implementing this is to have a set menu of sandwiches to choose from but the dumb appeal of Paldea’s sandwiches is making something unique.

We’ve seen salad bars but imagine the chaos of a full-blown DIY sandwich bar. This would be almost impossible because people cannot be trusted but hear me out.

You pay a set fee, get given your bread and let your creativity run wild. Before you sit a wide range of options from basic veggies to sausages, fried fillets and noodles.

You carefully select your favourites and assemble them with all the care and skill of a master bricklayer. Gently, you set down the top half of the sub roll before sealing it in place with a souvenir sandwich pick. You’ve built a masterpiece or is it a monstrosity? Probably the latter but you had fun right?

Now let’s be real, this would lead to colossal food wastage and so would never happen but it’s fun to imagine. More likely we’d get a standard menu of subs hopefully inspired by both sensible and weird Paldean creations. Personally, I’d be up for trying the Master Variety Sandwich - that's prosciutto, cherry tomatoes, smoked fillet, potato salad and a hamburger on a salt, vinegar and Bitter Herba Mystica base if you're curious. How about you?

Poké Puffs

Surprise, surprise, we’re heading back to Kalos for this one – the region based on France has incredible looking food, go figure.

And in the anime, these treats looked even more delicious! Scene from Pokémon the Series: XY

Poké Puffs look to be the Pokémon equivalent of the French treat, macarons – light, meringue-based treats with all sorts of flavours and fillings. You feed these snacks to your Pokémon in the Pokémon Amie minigame to become better friends with your teammates. It’s all very cute.

In the games, your Poké Puffs come in five flavours (sweet, mint, citrus, mocha and spice) and a few different grades, largely based on how decorated they are. You start out with your basic plain ones, then they get frosting, some little decorations and if you’re really lucky, you can find some of the unique ‘Supreme’ variants which have their own themes and decorations – including a set designed around the seasons. These would be so instagrammable and I’m sure would draw in visitors by the truckload.

Now sure, you could sell these in any kind of bakery in a park, but I would love to see someone really go to town with theming around a beautiful Kalosian patisserie, celebrating the history of the Poké Puff and all the wonderful flavours they’ve developed over the years. You could still have the same flavour profiles but expand to include more specifics, rather than just Spice. You could even tie it back to the Pokémon regions berries – similar to the donuts. Hey, maybe Ansha will branch out into Poké Puffs too.

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Pokémon Food Honourable Mentions

There are so many fun foods featured in the Pokémon universe that they wouldn’t all fit on this list, so of course we have a few honourable mentions.

Sushi-Go-Round

We’re going all the way back to 1999 for this one. On April 30^th 1999, Pokémon Stadium debuted in Japan for the N64 and with it came a batch of brilliant minigames including Sushi-Go-Round.

Oh to be a Lickitung with all the money in the world, just eating tasty sushi.

In this game, you controlled a hungry Lickitung trying to run up a massive bill by eating sushi – I’ve never vibed so much with a video game character.

So, why not have a Pokémon sushi restaurant featuring Lickitung? You could also bring in THE sushi Pokémon Tatsugiri, it’d be so cute.

But I’ll be honest, I don’t know how well this would be received outside of Japan. I’d love it, but how many folks in say, Universal Studios UK (a girl can dream) would want sushi during their park day. Not to mention, it’s quite costly and a bit tricky to produce at scale, so maybe not as viable as some of the other options on this list.

Pokémon Sleep

Released in 2023, Pokémon Sleep is a cute, sleep-tracking app where you befriend Pokémon by catching some Z’s. You partner with a Snorlax and need to raise its power throughout the week by feeding it berries and special dishes you can cook.

Snorlax enjoys everything you cook for it, but I'd quite like to try some of those dishes!

The Sleep dishes fit into three categories – Curries/Stews, Salads or Desserts/Drinks. So, while I think Sleep might be a bit too niche for its own outlet, some of the dishes you can make could certainly slot into a generic Pokémon restaurant.

For example, if we had a Galarian Curry House, the Hearty Cheeseburger Curry or ‘Dream Eater’ Butter Curry would not be out of place on the menu. You could serve up the ‘Huge Power’ Soy Donuts in an Ansha’s Donuts inspired outlet, or the Clodsire Éclair in any Pokémon bakery.

The salads might be a bit trickier outside of a general restaurant, but classics like the ‘Bulldoze’ Guacamole and Chips or the Moomoo Caprese Salad would fit onto pretty much any menu.

Pokéblocks and Poffins

With Pokémon Contests in Generations 3 and 4, trainers needed a way to boost the condition of their Pokémon – enter the Pokéblock and the Poffin.

The two fill the same in-game niche (you mix some berries to make a snack), but while the Pokéblock is a Pez-style, candy cube, the Poffin is more of a… bun? I’m not entirely sure, the name would suggest muffin but it looks more like a sweet bun to me.

A cake? A bun? Who knows what a Poffin is really?

Either way, both of these snacks offer a lot of opportunity to come up with fun flavours, but I’m not sure they fit in a restaurant or snack-stop environment. Poffins maybe, they could fill that grab-and-go vibe that things like a Mickey Beignet or a churro do in Disneyland, but Pokéblocks less so. However, I think they could both be a fun merchandise option – a souvenir snack you pick up in a gift shop that’s only available at the park. Especially if the Pokéblocks came in their signature case!

Berries and Berry Juice

So, this last one is maybe not really viable but it’s fun to think about, so it gets an honourable mention.

The Pokémon Universe has a ton of different berries, all with different inspirations, uses and flavour profiles. I would love to see a take on a Berry Juice shop. While we can’t recreate the berries (unless we get into themed pastries, but that’s another thing entirely), we could recreate the flavours in berry juices. Kalos' Lumiose City had a Juice Shoppe in Pokémon X and Y, so there's no reason we couldn't have one too!

It’d be so cute to rock up to Shuckle’s Juice Bar and just order a juice or a smoothie made from ‘berries’. Give me a Pecha and Nanab smoothie that’s actually peach and banana. You get the idea. Bonus points if they can incorporate Shuckle into the cup or juice delivery designs!

Come on now. They even showcased Shuckle as a juice dispenser in the Pokemon Horizons series!

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That about wraps up my Pokémon Food Wishlist, but what about you? What would you like to see in a Pokémon theme park?

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