Rainforest Cafes Are Still Popular within the US and Canada

In May 2022, two YouTubers crossed the country to tackle a culinary quest for the ages. Eddy Burback and Ted Nivison planned to go to the 18 remaining Rainforest Cafes within the U.S. and Canada over the course of 21 days. Starting in California, they trek across the wide expanse of North America to sample the restaurant chain’s beef lava nachos and safari fries. The duo appear to have very different experiences: Burback appears downtrodden, disillusioned by his suburban, jungle-themed environs; while Nivison gleefully cavorts with the animatronic elephants and happily scarfs down his rasta pasta.

What the 2 appear to share is a style of winking wistfulness for the restaurant or for what it once represented. It’s a standard thread in a distinctly millennial and Gen Z subculture that regards experiential chain restaurants like Rainforest Cafe, Planet Hollywood, and other vestiges of the Nineteen Nineties with equal-parts nostalgia and irony.

The Rainforest Cafe opened its first location in Minnesota’s Mall of America in 1994, and it enjoyed years of success before sales began to slump circa 2000. As early as 1998, The Recent York Times reported that themed novelty restaurants were struggling, and the Rainforest Cafe was one in all the victims of the dawn of the brand new millennium. A 2000 acquisition by Landry’s, Inc., a restaurant holding company, kept the chain alive, albeit without the passion it had once generated. Through the aughts, locations across the country closed one after the other. Now, the chain is a shadow of what it once was, with fewer than 20 branches for Burback and Nivison to go to on their cross-countries quest.

Within the intervening years, American culture shifted precipitously. Slews of suburban malls, by which many Rainforest Cafes were situated, closed throughout the Great Recession, their spaces relegated to artifacts from a former economic age. “During the last decade, I feel there have been about 900 malls in america…. A few third of them have closed,” said Ronald Friedman, partner at Marcum LLP, a firm that conducts consumer research. Americans wrestled with the recession of 2008, not keen to spend a whole bunch of dollars for what many regard as sub-par food—jungle-themed surroundings or not. Stats from america Department of Agriculture show that restaurant spending dropped 13% throughout the Great Recession.

The years preceding Trump’s election—and the sociopolitical chaos we’ve been mired in since—have ushered in an age of critique of consumerism and capitalism, asking us to be more thoughtful about what we buy and who we buy it from, in addition to who’s affected in the method. In accordance with a 2021 survey, 85% of consumers, especially millennials and Gen Z, claim they’re willing to pay more for sustainable products.

For some modern diners, experiential restaurants just like the Rainforest Cafe represent the cultural landscape of a really specific time in American history. Within the late Nineteen Nineties, those with the comfort and privilege to achieve this could engage in uncritical consumerism, and might decide to eschew politics in favor of the finer things in life, akin to brownie “volcanoes” dripping with every sweet topping possible and gift shops brimming with $30 stuffed toys.

The YouTube channel The Food Theorists also links the recognition of the Rainforest Cafe as a natural extension of the type of low cost environmentalism espoused within the ’90s: Save the rainforest by eating a juicy, cheese-covered rainforest burger in an artificial jungle!

Nearly 30 years after the birth of the Rainforest Cafe, some young restaurant-goers are rediscovering the enduring restaurant experiences of their youth, perhaps in search of the simplicity of a past era—each on a private and cultural level. In September 2022, Danny Lavery wrote concerning the chaotic joy of Medieval Times in Food & Wine. TikTokers of their 20s are visiting the American Girl Café, reliving the tea parties of their youth.

In an article for Insider, journalist Alanis King attributes a few of the modern-day enthusiasm for the Rainforest Cafe to Gen Z’s fascination with the Y2K era. “I feel we’re at a really interesting time where Y2K is coming back, and everybody’s… reaching back into this time from after I was a child, like late ’90s, early 2000s, and it does type of does make you nostalgic.”

Spencer Cammarano, a Brooklyn-based public relations executive and longtime Rainforest Cafe enthusiast, agrees. “You don’t go to Rainforest Cafe for anything apart from fun. There’s a charm in the shortage of pretension and the shortage of shine to it.”

But, for some, there’s irony to visiting the Rainforest Cafe and other sorts of experiential restaurants. Burback, one in all the 2 YouTubers who traveled to multiple establishments, seems to expect so little from the chain that he expresses real shock when his visit to the San Antonio location was actually somewhat enjoyable. “So, this Rainforest Cafe is, like, actually a cool spot to eat. That doesn’t really make sense to me. I’m presupposed to be in a mall and depressed.”

King is less surprised. “Irony’s just part of contemporary online culture, and I feel that’s why lots of Y2K stuff is coming back and why stuff just like the Rainforest Cafe is more in conversation.”

Robert Byrne, the director of consumer and industry insights at Technomic, Inc., a food service management consulting company, attributes a few of the restaurant’s post-pandemic success to the incontrovertible fact that, despite its age, the Rainforest Cafe could be very social media friendly. “[It’s] visual, there’s stuff happening on a regular basis. Should you take into consideration content creation too, there’s a relatability that goes on there. So, should you are connecting together with your peers, and also you’re connecting via something that’s nostalgic, there may be that shared experience.”

There’s a component of the absurd, too. An aging restaurant posing as a jungle, teenagers play-jousting at a dinner theater, a café for dolls which have faded into irrelevance—it’s all a bit odd, and echoes the web’s fascination with liminal spaces, largely conceptualized in photos that appear vaguely harking back to the ’90s but broken down, abandoned, empty.

Whether you approach experiential restaurants like Rainforest Cafe, American Girl Cafe, or Medieval Times in a purely nostalgic way, completely happy to once more dine amongst the animatronic gorillas, it’s hard to disclaim that these restaurants are—and have all the time been—dedicated to fun.

In our very high-stakes modern era, rife with sociocultural unrest, political drama, and a pandemic, many individuals concurrently crave escapism and a way of belonging. Hopefully, you don’t need to cross state lines to search out it.

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