meet me at the rainforest cafe
"a wild place to shop and eat"
***A quick note before we begin – last week I uploaded a little interactive short story called “answer these 10 questions and i'll tell you what kind of lover you are” on itch.io. It’s sort of like if a prose poem and a buzzfeed quiz had a baby and they all fucking hated you because you broke their hearts. It would be cool if you checked it out.***
There’s a whole class of restaurants that feel like they exist somewhere between dinner theater and performance art – Hooters, Planet Hollywood, Benihana, the Rainforest Cafe. You don’t go there for the food so much as the experience, which isn’t exactly entertainment but isn’t not entertainment either. A particular restaurant’s appeal might be its staff or its decor, but whatever it is, it’s something that, like good theater, must be experienced live and in person. There is no use ordering delivery from these places.
The Rainforest Cafe is perhaps the crown jewel of these restaurant experiences. It is, in fact, perhaps the crown jewel of the entire restaurant industry – it’s a true feat of human achievement and creativity.
The Rainforest Cafe greets you before you enter. The sound of jungle creatures cannot be contained by the restaurant’s doors – it echoes through shopping mall hallways and parking lots, alongside plastic vines and rock cascades. It calls to you, wafting outwards with the smell of chlorinated water and fryer grease.
Succumb to the siren song and, just past the host stand, you’re plunged into a misty low light room where animatronic elephants and gorillas peer past the trees and vines. If you’re lucky, you can sit next to one of the giant illuminated aquariums and watch real fish swim around while you eat. There’s even a talking tree. Every seventeen minutes or so, a thunderstorm rolls through, complete with strobe lights and sound effects. The mechanical animals yell in response.
I experienced the Rainforest Cafe as it’s meant to be experienced – in a New Jersey shopping mall, in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis, always on someone’s birthday. Going out to eat was a big treat in my family then, and somewhere like the Rainforest Cafe was reserved for special occasions. The closest location (inside the Menlo Park Mall, in Edison, NJ) was a good 25 minutes away, a considerable drive for a place where a mediocre bowl of pasta will run you $23.99. The rarity of our trips to Edison only made them more exciting to my siblings and me. The Rainforest Cafe was an almost mythical place in our minds, more magical than Disney World.
Even waiting for a table there was exciting. We could throw coins into a manmade stream, where a crocodile waved its head and tail back and forth at us. We could browse the gift shop, admiring stuffed animals and t-shirts and commemorative plastic cups that our parents would never buy us. I would inevitably bond with my older sister about how we were both going to order chicken tenders (which we did at every restaurant with a kids’ menu for years). In the pre-Rainforest-Cafe high, there were no fights between siblings. All three of us were best friends in that waiting area, watching the distant jaguars and craning our necks to get a peek at the live fish.
I couldn’t tell you with any certainty if those chicken fingers were good or not. Despite being, first and foremost, a restaurant, the food is not the point here. Nothing is great, but it’s not that bad, either. (At least, I don’t think so, but I’m working with a decade’s worth of nostalgia here.) The menu is largely your standard American fair, burgers and salads and pastas with some outliers like “beef lava nachos” (no clue what those are) and a few random “international” offerings sprinkled in, given borderline racist names like “aloha salmon and shrimp” or “China Island chicken salad.”
The only item on the menu that I remember with any real clarity is the iconic “sparkling volcano,” a brownie cake stacked into a volcanic-ish pyramid and layered with ice cream, whipped cream, caramel, and chocolate sauce available for a whopping $17.99. It’s several steps beyond the standard brownie sundae. When ordered on a birthday, it came adorned with a sparkler rather than a candle. This comparatively massive fire brought a real sense of danger to the dining experience of a ten-year-old, far beyond anything available at Chili’s or the Cheesecake Factory.
This danger is exactly why the Rainforest Cafe no longer offers birthday sparklers. It seems like OSHA may have had some thoughts about fire hazards.
The lack of sparklers isn’t the only way that the Rainforest Cafe has been toned down in the years since its opening. The very first location, in Minnesota’s Mall of America, boasted live parrots when it opened in 1994. Caring for the birds cost approximately $100,000 a year, and they were nixed in 2000 when Landry’s, Inc. bought the company. Founder Steven Schussler was disappointed to lose the birds – they had been his inspiration for the whole project.
And Steven Schussler is nothing if not committed to his ideas. A lover of parrots and fish, he wanted to create a restaurant that celebrated their beauty and convinced diners that they needed to save the rainforest. In order to convince investors that his concept was viable, in 1989 Schussler converted his suburban Minneapolis home into a prototype Rainforest Cafe. He wrote about this work in his book of business advice It's a Jungle in There:
Over a period of a few years, my standard split-level home was transformed into a jungle dwelling complete with rock outcroppings, waterfalls, rivers, layers of fog, mist that rose from the ground, a thatched hut covered with vines on the roof, tiki torches, a twelve-foot neon ‘paradise’ sign, and a full-size replica of an elephant near the front door.
It wasn’t easy to create this life-size prototype. I had to knock out rooms to create a greenhouse and I purchased 3,700 bright orange extension cords to hook up to the twenty different sound systems, lights, and fog pumps that provided the jungle noise and mist that floated through the house. Then I had to learn to live with forty tropical birds, two 150-pound tortoises, a baboon, an iguana, and a bevy of tropical fish housed in ten 300-gallon tanks. There were also fifty different animatronic creatures in the house–a collection of mechanized alligators, gorillas, and monkeys. At least I didn’t have to feed or clean up after them, but changing their batteries was a real chore. I finally devised a way to get them to run on electricity.
Schussler filled his house’s 35-foot waterfall and river with pink anti-freeze so that it could keep flowing in the winter. When investors showed up for tours, he wore a safari guide uniform and carried one of the parrots on his shoulder.
The whole project took him three years and almost $400,000 (somewhere around $900,000 in today’s money, adjusted for inflation). It enraged his neighbors, who started a watch group and updated each other on his activities via walkie talkie. The DEA raided his home, convinced that he was growing weed because his electricity bill was so high.
The prototype eventually won over venture capitalist Lyle Berman, but not until he visited it 27 times over two years. It wasn’t easy to convince him, or anyone else, that the idea would work.
But what scared away investors is exactly what makes the Rainforest Cafe, even all these years later, incredible – its above and beyond commitment to its concept. Unlike other themed restaurants, where diners’ comfort is prioritized, no one here cares if you can’t hear the daily specials over the elephant’s trumpets. It doesn't matter if you can barely see your menu, or if you would prefer to eat cream-based pasta sauces in a room that isn’t deliberately steamy. Oh your child got scared by the noise and elaborate special effects of the thunderstorm? They better get over it quick, because another one’s coming.
It seems kind of impossible that the Rainforest Cafe is actually enjoyable, but I’m of the opinion that its magic lives up to the childhood memories. Everything is so over the top that you can’t not have fun. Dinner there is an assault on every single one of your senses; by the time you leave, it’s like you’ve spent an entire day at some fever dream hybrid zoo-amusement park-aquarium-IMAX movie theater.
And sure, some locations are a bit past their prime now, but even if the carpets are worn down, and the paint on the animals is a little faded, the thunderstorms still roll through every seventeen minutes. It still smells like chlorine and bar food. The ceilings are still lush jungle canopies, crowded with plastic leaves and vines, and the fish tanks are not any less impressive. Even if the live parrots are long gone, the jerky, robotic way that the animatronic animals move is honestly quite charming.
I haven’t eaten at a Rainforest Cafe since my family left New Jersey when I was twelve, but I would very much like to again. I’ve been thinking about it for weeks. The closest location to me now, living in Philadelphia as an adult, is back in Jersey, in Atlantic City. I actually walked through its gift shop a few years ago, on a day trip with my roommate, after we hit the boardwalk but before Heather won $9 on the slots at Caesar’s. We’d already spent too much money that day to splash out on dinner, as much as we wanted to. (I will note here, by the way, that the Atlantic City prices are several dollars higher, per item, than those on the Edison menu. It’s a significant amount when you’re only 21 and you already spent twenty bucks on Ripley’s Believe It Not Museum and you still have to buy your train ticket back home.) Instead we spent a good ten minutes watching kids throw pennies at the robot crocodile, just like we both had when we were little.
Everything was exactly as I remembered, and the darkened, cavernous restaurant beyond the gift shop still beckoned, just as enticing now as it was when I was a kid. I’m gonna go back soon. There’s a sparkling volcano with my name on it.
xoxo meet me at the Rainforest Cafe,
Franny 💋 🌺 🐘
