The Rainforest Café Is Still a Wildly Good Time

Thanks to Gen Z nostalgia and TikTok, the “eatertainment” icon is hanging in–and absolutely worth visiting.

The wildest New Year’s Eve I’ve had in years began with an hour-long drive to Edison, New Jersey. As I sat in my friend’s car, I contemplated the journey we’d embarked on that dreary morning: I knew that when we arrived at our destination, an immersive sensory experience would envelop us in flashing lights and roaring music. If we were lucky, we might even walk through a cooling mist on our way into the wondrous spectacle. However gray it might have been outside my window, our environment would soon luminesce. We were headed, after all, to the enthralling novelty that is the Rainforest Café.

Just across the hall from a dessert kiosk and a cell phone-repair store in the mall lay an ecosystem that erases the trappings of suburbia just outside. A sign carved into a gnarled faux tree announced the journey ahead: YOUR ADVENTURE BEGINS HERE. When our party of four crossed the verdant threshold, we were one of only two child-free tables in the restaurant. All around us were patrons partaking in the Rainforest Café’s time-honored, family-friendly traditions—children’s birthday parties, intergenerational gatherings, and much-needed breaks from the fluorescent chaos of the mall.

But as an hour stretched on, the atmosphere shifted. A group of four adults sat at the table directly behind us and joked to one another about the lack of children in their party, too. Five teens excitedly strode in, making a beeline for a table near a giant Atlas statue suspended in one of the restaurant’s many waterfall nooks. A couple ordered drinks, clinking their commemorative Rainforest Café glasses as they smiled at one another. However challenging 2023 had been, it seemed, the kitschy restaurant provided an undeniable comfort on the year’s last day. There, amid a symphony of animatronics and prerecorded thunder, we all basked in the unique pleasure of surrendering to the uncanny ambiance. Sitting inside a restaurant so wholly committed to the bit made any pretense of ego slip away: We were there to consume tropical drinks from souvenir glasses, eat inadvisable amounts of coconut shrimp, and marvel at bar stools designed to look like animal legs. Where else could we do that now?

There was—and really, still is—no place quite like the Rainforest Café. The Edison outpost is one of only 23 remaining Rainforest Cafés around the world, and 16 still operating within the United States. But at its peak in the early aughts, the chain had 45 locations stretching from Hong Kong to Chicago. At the first, which opened in 1994 at Minnesota’s Mall of America, demand was so high that diners sometimes waited for hours to be seated. The restaurant became the stuff of lore even before its founding: In an attempt to get investor buy-in on his idea for a tropical-themed “eatertainment” bastion, the Minnesota businessman Steven Schussler spent nearly $400,000 renovating his own home to reflect his love of animals and passion for rainforest conservation. As he recounts in his memoir, It’s a Jungle in There, Schussler filled the split-level suburban house with animals of all stripes, turning it 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.”

"Sitting inside a restaurant so wholly committed to the bit made any pretense of ego slip away."

Just as sightseers of the 1990s flocked to Schussler’s residential Eden held together by the power of 3700 extension cords, today’s Rainforest Café devotees eagerly travel to the dining anomaly often tucked into unassuming suburban landscapes. And because of the restaurant’s relative scarcity, several of the guests dining in Edison’s Menlo Park Mall on New Year’s Eve had made pilgrimages from well beyond the surrounding enclaves: At least one other group trekked in from New York City, and a few others commuted from stretches of New Jersey nearly just as far away. It turned out that the teenagers sitting at Atlas’s feet had arguably come the farthest: They drove two hours from Pennsylvania that day, finally making good on a plan they’d set in motion during the summer. Part of the thrill, 17-year-old Mikayla Turnage said, was sharing the experience with a friend visiting all the way from Germany.

For Turnage, eating at the Rainforest Café evoked fond memories from her childhood, when her family celebrated her brother’s birthday at a defunct Pennsylvania location. Speaking with her German friend before their much-anticipated trip, Turnage emphasized how much more special the Rainforest Café feels now that so few novelty dining establishments still exist: “I would always describe it as, like, Imagine you’re going on a Disney ride, except you’re in a restaurant and you get to eat,” she said. “No one wants a boring restaurant. I think they’re so, ugh.”

Turnage’s assessment isn’t far off base: Over the years, several Rainforest Cafés have opened near Disney theme parks. (Some, like the Downtown Disney one that planted the seeds of my own Rainforest Café nostalgia in the 1990s, have since closed.) The restaurant was never directly affiliated with Disney, but one outpost does still feature an attraction that would be right at home alongside the Jungle Cruise, Splash Mountain, or the Enchanted Tiki Room. At the Rainforest Café in Galveston, Texas, diners can pay an additional $7.49 to go on the Rainforest River Adventure Ride. The ride is one highlight of a viral 2022 video by the YouTube personality Ted Nivison. That year, Nivison, along with his friend and fellow YouTuber, Eddy Burback, drove to every one of the restaurant’s remaining North America locations. Turnage and her friends, who are big Nivison fans, started hatching their plan to visit the eatertainment juggernaut of her childhood after watching the vloggers’ odyssey.

It turns out a whole lot of other people had the same idea. That’s not altogether surprising: Nivison and Burback have a combined following of more than 3 million subscribers on YouTube alone, but they’re not the only social media personalities to document nostalgia-fueled trips to the “wild place to shop and eat.” Across various platforms, young creators have been sharing videos that capture their Rainforest Café experiences. Whether they’re making jokes about the signature thunderstorms, testing out the Galveston river ride, or dressing up for the occasion, almost all of these videos seem to be united in their earnest appreciation for the whimsical restaurant that still seems so unlike anything else. That’s particularly striking in our current economic climate, which sees corporations hesitant to take risks on any ideas that fall outside clearly proven parameters—much less invest in a dining concept as resource-intensive as the sprawling jungle-replica operation.

In the last few years, the remaining Rainforest Café locations have seen a wave of renewed interest from diners—even as malls, where many of them are located, still struggle to attract shoppers. Adam Loreant, the regional general manager for Texas Rainforest Cafés, told me he attributes a great deal of the uptick in business to social media attention. It helps explain, for example, why they’re seeing consistent numbers of guests in their teens and twenties now. Loreant, who works at the Galveston location with the famed river ride, pointed out that many customers who first came to the restaurant as children are now old enough to frequent it with their own kids. Because the environment is so full of stimuli, the Rainforest Café makes it less tempting for families to sit at a table silently staring at their individual cell phones, Loreant says: “It kinda makes you walk around with your children [and] point to things and talk to them about the gorillas or watch a child imitate an elephant.”

"Whether they’re making jokes about the signature thunderstorms, testing out the Galveston river ride, or dressing up for the occasion, almost all of these videos seem to be united in their earnest appreciation for the whimsical restaurant that still seems so unlike anything else."

All the longtime Rainforest Café fans I spoke with mentioned how important the interactive element of the space had been for them in the past. Sayeedah McNair Bey, a 46-year-old mother of six from Chicago, used to take her older children to the now-defunct downtown location to ring in their birthdays in the early aughts. “I remember a couple of times I actually used that as a teaching moment for my children to identify animals,” she says. And when her daughters asked, “Mommy, what’s the rainforest?” as they sat in the restaurant, the family got an early education on conservation from their servers. “I know at that time, the rainforest was in danger,” McNair Bey adds, which made it all the more important for her children to learn “about the climate and why they call it a rainforest.” (In a fun bit of continuing Rainforest Café lore, the old Chicago location, which still has giant mushrooms around its exterior, nearly became a dispensary.)

I’ll admit I wasn’t thinking much about conservation, or the restaurant’s contributions to those efforts over the years, the last time I was at the Rainforest Café. Mostly, I was just happy to be there, sipping my somewhat cloying Cheetah ‘Rita and sharing a legitimately delicious Awesome Appetizer Adventure with my friends. Reflecting back on my New Year’s Eve now, I’m tempted to text them about heading right back to Jersey again the next time we’ve got something to celebrate. Where else in the tri-state area can we go to get transported into an entirely different ecosystem? As Loreant put it, “We could charge $15 for a hamburger just like the next guy charges $15 for hamburger, but what are you getting out of that experience while you’re here?”

Read the original article on All Recipes.