The Princess Diaries is the Ultimate Girl Dinner Film
A full breakdown of every edible shot in the 2001 Disney classic
M&Ms on pizza and pianos. Bright green palate cleansers. Soft serve ice cream. Corn dogs for queens. Gazpacho. Afternoon tea. Crisp apple strudels. Pure nostalgia on a platter.
When I think of food in film, it’s hard not to think about The Princess Diaries. Directed by Garry Marshall, released by Disney in 2001, and Anne Hathaway’s feature film debut, the movie was a loose adaptation of the popular young adult novel of the same name by Meg Cabot.
Most importantly, you’d be hard-pressed to find a live-action, G-rated film with more food and drink than The Princess Diaries. I think about the delectable delights in this movie at least once a day. And after reading this post, I’d wager you will too.
Today, let us examine The Princess Diaries’ complicated, flavorful place in gourmet-cinematic history:
Every Item of Food, Candy, and Drink in The Princess Diaries...
Afternoon Tea with Pears
In the film, Julie Andrews plays the queen of the fictional European kingdom of Genovia. Known worldwide for its pears, the queen serves her country’s most prominent export to her granddaughter with afternoon tea as she breaks the news: Mia, Anne Hathaway, is a royal princess.
(For the uninitiated: The film follows Mia Thermopolis, a San Franciscan teenager navigating coming-of-age high school drama, as she discovers she is a princess in line for the throne of a small European country.)
To my untrained eye, the “Genovian” pears featured throughout the film often appear to be French Butter Pears — a European pear variety that is available at many specialty grocery stores in the US and around the globe.
Saltines, Skippy Peanut Butter + Oranges
After absorbing the news that she is, in fact, European royalty, Mia heads home and makes herself a dinner of Skippy Creamy Peanut Butter on Nabisco’s classic Premium Saltines, with an orange on the side. The original “Girl Dinner” princess, Mia ostensibly chooses to whip up this quick meal in an attempt to avoid talking to her mother in the kitchen and digest this life-changing information alone in her room.
All present peanut-butter-lovers may also enjoy this deep dish into Some Like It Hot’s train charcuterie scene that, too, features a jar of Skippy’s finest.
Mia + Helen’s Grocery List
Less than a third of the way through the movie, and we’ve got a chalkboard grocery list prominently displayed in the background. A food-in-film dream! Ostensibly written by Mia’s free-spirited artist-mom Helen, this shopping list appears to include items like cookies, eggs, and valerian root tea.
Keyboard M&Ms + An Entry into the Coppola-Cinematic-Universe
Triva Time: Just when you thought you were safe from the Francis-Ford-Coppola-Cinematic-Universe, we meet Michael Moscovitz. In the film, he’s the brother of Lily, Mia’s best friend. In reality, he’s Robert Schwartzman, brother of Jason Schwartzman, cousin of Sofia Coppola, Nicolas Cage, Roman Coppola, Gia Coppola…. twenty Wikipedia pages later, the point is, no major studio film comes out un-Coppolad. During my tour-de-Princess-Diaries a.k.a. tourist visit to San Francisco, California, I made sure to crack open a Coppola sparkling wine in their honor.
I digress. The real point of the M&Ms-on-the-keyboard shot is to expose Michael as a musician and mechanic who loves to play the keys and eat M&Ms that his grubby, greasy fingers have been touching for hours. Mmm, Delicious.
The M&Ms become very important later in this post, so hang tight.
Princess-in-Training Salad
At one point, Anne Hathaway’s Mia is tied to a chair with a Hermès-adjacent scarf in an effort to learn princess-like table manners. Served iced tea with lemon, a plain dinner roll, and a simple salad consisting of mesclun greens and cherry tomatoes, Mia inexplicably feels compelled to reach for the salt and pepper shakers, which are placed just out of her grasp. Who knew an underdressed salad could birth such slapstick antics?
Tea & Coffee Cup Status Indicators
The brilliant Sandra Oh plays Mia’s school principal. After a classic media-related snafu — it all comes with being a secret princess, am I right? — Sandra Oh offers both Mia’s grandmother — Queen Clarice Renaldi, and her mother some tea. Mia’s mother receives a styrofoam cup, and the Queen receives “the finest china” the school had available. To put it bluntly, the movie was seeding class consciousness into the minds of Gen Z quite early on!
Mia’s First Genovian State Dinner: Green Soup + Fire
No more than five minutes into Mia’s very first banquet dinner does she accidentally set the sleeves of her neighbors aflame. Normally, this would be too anxiety-inducing of a comedic moment for me, but luckily the film instantly cools audiences off with a refreshing… Genovian green soup?
Given I imagine the fictional country of Genovia to be a western European microstate (think Monaco and Andorra), where the summers can be sweltering, I strongly suspect this green soup is a cold gazpacho with a crema-based “G” expertly plated atop.
Unfortunately, the scene moves along all too quickly to the next dish…
Sorbet: A Brain-Freeze Intermezzo
Sorbet is one of those dishes that half a dozen different cultures all claim as their invention. The internet will tell you everyone from the ancient Persians to the Romans and Italians to the Turks invented these flavored ice dishes. Alas, until historians buckle down and get to uncovering this very important history, we’re not entirely sure why or how ancient peoples were preparing their sorbets.
Here’s what we do know: When not filled to the brink of death with sugar and used as a dessert, the Italians used and still use sorbet as an “Intermezzo”, an interlude between flavorful courses. As the prime minister in the scene notes, sorbetto is meant to “cleanse the palate.” (Intermezzi in operas, I am told — I’ve only bore witness to a handful! — are meant to provide comic relief between the heavier, dramatic, and, to my ear, more piercing scenes.)
I find it especially fitting, then, that the comedic tragedy in The Princess Diaries film reaches new heights when Amelia Mignonette Thermopolis Renaldi takes a big heaping bite of a green frozen sorbet served in a crystal dish.
Speaking as someone who received my fair share of brain freezes upon sucking the too-long straw of a drive-thru Dunkin’ Donuts Strawberry Coolatta® in my youth, I knew exactly what was happening when I first watched the scene play out.
Delightful food writer Priya Krishna wrote a whole piece in The Cut about the brain freeze that ensued. You can also find a recipe for a similar green sorbet on The Starving Chef. The fact that at least two other people have spent a large portion of their life obsessing over this scene is comforting to say the least.
Fragile Champagne Flutes
At one point, Mia taps her silverware on her glass, attempting to make that classic “clink” sound we strive for when someone is about to make a speech. Naturally, the glass breaks in a matter of seconds. Mia also receives a stuffed bell pepper.
Dessert Cheese Plate with Grape and Pear
Mia has already endured a misogynistic makeover executed by a certified sleazeball hairdresser, why is she being forced to cut a lone grape in half? There’s only so much a teenager can take.
Fisherman’s Wharf Arcade and Corn Dogs
I visited San Francisco for the first time in 2022. My first stop? Musée Mécanique, the vintage mechanical arcade located at the city’s famous Fisherman’s Wharf.
Yes, I was raised going to vintage game arcades, but the real driver behind this visit was it’s connection to The Princess Diaries. In the video below, you can watch as I (poorly) arm wrestle the very same machine Julie Andrews as Queen Renaldi once did 21 years prior.
Alas, I wasn’t able to secure a vegan corn dog, but I’m sure the corn dogs sold by the vendors of the Wharf are just as scrumptious as the movies makes them out to be.
Elaborate Beach Party Fruit Spread
Shoved between establishing shots of a high school beach party, astute Princess Diaries viewers will clock this shot of a fruit buffet. I cannot overstate how unrealistic the grape-to-other-fruit ratio is here.
Whether it was the kids of San Francisco in the early 2000’s or the art department on this movie, someone involved in this film was an absolute grape fiend.
Diet Coke + Ice Cream Cone Revenge
Here, Mia’s cheerleader bullies are drinking bottles of Diet Coke, with strategically placed to avoid the camera.
In an era during which most popular American media portrayed high school cheerleaders perpetually in uniform as teenage royalty, Mia’s decision to shove an ice cream cone into Mandy Moore’s mean-girl attire was fitting. After all, at this point in the movie, Mia could care less about who is and isn’t a princess.
Three Thousand Cups of Tea
There are about three thousand cups of tea featured throughout this movie, and I didn’t think it was worth it to mention them all. But just know, they’re there and they are plentiful.
“Sorry” M&M Pizza and The Non-Existent Self
The Princess Diaries is a story about identity: “Who am I? Is ‘I’ even a thing? Why can I not seem to disappear? Do I have an obligation to be visible and a member of society?”
It’s easier to say “no” to everything and never participate in the general goings-on in your orbit, sure. But no matter how much you resist and try to stay ensconced inside your house all day, the safety of home, the safety of throwing darts at balloons filled with paint, safety is but a fantastical illusion. Sooner or later you are going to get sucked into the world happening around you, so you might as well choose to participate in your own way.
The film’s ultimate love interest has always struck me as a character who is low-key aware that there is no such thing as one’s self. Michael Moscovitz fixes cars, he plays in a band, and he eats M&Ms off of the keys while he does it. He’s a teenager and he has a crush on his sister’s friend. But he’s still out here living life in 2001 teenage dreamland, baby! He’s healthily and humbly embracing it all.
Mia, by contrast, absolutely cannot compute or relate to embracing anything at the beginning of the film. She’s young, she doesn’t know what’s happening, and all she knows is that she likes her cat. But by the end? She’s having actual, real-life, adventures. She accepts her inevitable place within some old-school monarchy and embraces romance in a way that is both puppy-love-fantasy and also more pragmatic than crushing on the jock who is not very nice.
To me, the M&Ms in The Princess Diaries represent doing your own thing while operating IN the world, rather than hiding from everything and doing nothing. At the film’s climax, when Mia orders the “SORRY” pizza for Michael, she is committing to participating in the life she has been given, despite its imperfections and the anxieties it offers.
The Princess Diaries (2001) Film Flavor Ratings
Film Rating: ★★★★
Food Rating: ★★★★★+++
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With gratitude,
p.s. This post is based on three Instagram posts I made before the Film Flavor newsletter began. You can find those original posts @FilmFlavor on IG.
I think this may be the only movie in existence to feature Julie Andrews eating a corn dog, but I could be wrong. :-)
wow did not realize that dude was a Coppola