On The Rainforest Cafe

and the tragic deforestation of America's favorite family restaraunt

The Rainforest Cafe in my hometown closed in February of 2013. Though, I probably hadn’t been there since 2005. Over the years, and until recently, my memory of it had grown fond, even a little tender. At the very least, there were aspects that distinguished it from other family dining experiences. I had recollections of it being exotically dark and perfectly frightening. 

I’d grown nostalgic for other details of the Rainforest Cafe, as well. Occasionally, upon meeting someone else who’d been to one in their childhood, we’d reminisce about the symphony of animal sounds that would carry melodic tunes throughout the meal –  we’d share a sentimental nod in agreement of how it smelled, regardless of the location, of a citrusy-chemical mist. And while few remembered much about the food, no one forgets the Sparkling Lava Cake that paid a tasteful homage to all those who had lost their lives to the unpredictable whims of volcanic eruptions. But, most notably, what had calcified in my head over the years were the images of my family, each of their faces as excited and filled with wonder as mine. 

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Last month, for the first time in almost twenty years, I returned to The Rainforest Cafe. Somehow, I convinced my girlfriend Olivia that we should celebrate her finishing the Twin Cities Marathon in the company of animatronic gorillas and glow-in-the-dark lemonades. And at the flagship location, no less –  burrowed towards the back corner of the third floor at the Mall of America, in Bloomington, Minnesota. She’d never been, but I was certain that she would love it as I once did. 

Any romantic notions I harbored for the franchise were pretty much confiscated at the door. It was like re-watching a movie you’d sworn was hilarious, only to find that now, if anyone knew you once loved this movie, they'd have you canceled. Right away I was disappointed that the citrusy smell I remembered had either faded or never existed. Instead, the entrance smelled of clean diapers and fried food.

Nothing was how I had remembered. It was certainly not cavernously dark and adventurous – it was hardly darker than an aquarium. It was not, as I could have sworn, staffed by gregarious zoologists like Steve Iriwin, anxiously ready to take your order. And maybe because it was in the middle of a Monday afternoon, the place was not crowded with affectionate families, eager to bring their youngest born into a new year of age with a chocolatey volcanic eruption. Rather, I saw a lopsided mother downing a Heinekin in the booth behind us, a few languid couples staring at their phones, disinterested in their entrees, and jaded staff members sucking at the tit of their Juuls. 

Try a Coronarita!

Memory is both a fragile and reckless thing. It shapes and is shaped by how you’ve come to see yourself in the preceding days, months, and years. My childhood, as I recall, was not particularly kid-oriented. That isn’t to say I was glued to C-SPAN or constantly accompanying my parents to their colonoscopies, but I don’t recall going to kid-centric places like arcades or joining boy scouts either. For that reason, the  Rainforest Cafe has served as one of the titular backdrops to the reconstructed scenes of my youth. For me, it represented a flattering playground for compromise – a place I thought everyone in our fledgling family wouldn’t mind going. 

That felt laughable now. Of course they minded – the place is a dimly lit Applebees with moist walls and screeching toucans. But was it always this way?There must have been a substantive reason that each location of the Rainforest Cafe, as I’ve subsequently learned, was making over $8 million a year by 1999—the most revenue per spot of any restaurant in the country.

At its peak, there were over 50 Rainforest Cafes around the world. Now there are 17. So what led to this rapid deforestation – over 30 closures in the last decade? Few franchises have ever shrunk so quickly after resounding success, with seemingly no region of the country immune. The decline, which reportedly began in 2011, was swift and unforgiving.

Maybe it was the recession in 2008, or the rise of Chipotle in 2011, that put the nail in the coffin for Rainforest Cafe? But I think it was something deeper and more enduring that has kept people from its doors. Something to do with how we’ve come to approach and understand innovation in the last two decades. In my lifetime, innovation has become synonymous with maximizing efficiency. Maximizing efficiency is synonymous with automation, and automation is shorthand for non-human work. Nothing about the Rainforest Cafe franchise was designed to be efficient. The concept was never intended to be mass produced, nor was it concocted in a midtown skyscraper by business executives. 

See, the first true location of Rainforest Cafe wasn’t at the Mall of America. The restaurant was born in founder Steven Schussler’s Minneapolis home. After selling basically everything he owned, the former advertising salesman transitioned his property into his quixotic vision: a restaurant in the middle of the rainforest. “Artificial waterfalls tumbled down custom-made rock formations, animatronic crocodiles bobbed their heads, and speakers piped in the roar of a tropical thunderstorm,” wrote Fortune magazine in 1996.

Schussler used 3,700 extension cords to power the 20 different sound systems, lights and fog pumps for his prototype. And animals – live animals! He had forty tropical birds, two 150-pound tortoises, a baboon, an iguana, and “a bevy of tropical fish housed in ten 300-gallon fish tanks,” Schussler recalls in his memoir, It’s a Jungle In There. At the beginning, his neighbors guessed he was creating “either a temple for devil worship or a bordello,” wrote Orange Coast magazine in 1998. 

In October of 1994,  the power company assumed he was growing marijuana, thanks to what was the highest electricity bill of any residence in Minnesota. The next month, the Drug Enforcement Agency showed up at his doorstep. They didn’t find any drugs, but they noted the green laboratory he had installed on the roof. It didn’t just house a full bar and tables, but also butterflies – bred “to determine how long they would survive and whether they would fall in the food.”

“Overall, it took me three years and almost $400,000 to get the house developed to the point where I felt comfortable showing it to potential investors,” Schussler writes in his memoir. “I figured it would be like Field of Dreams: if I built it, people would come… but it certainly was not an overnight success. [Investors] couldn’t see the forest for the trees. They weren’t visionaries.”

I don’t know if Steve Schussler was a visionary. When the iPhone came out in 2007, I question if he could have envisioned what it would do to our sense of wonder – that we’d stop caring much about our physical senses – that’d we be amazed not by sensory overload, but the convenience of Google Maps and the compactness of an Airpod. While Olivia and I sipped our 15 dollars glow-in-the dark lemonades, each of us scanning the room trying to understand why I brought us here, I kept coming back to the same thought: there are wonderful things, and there are wonderful things people believe in. By the looks of the weary teenage chefs and the chipped paint on the beak of the toucan, the belief had dwindled. When the franchise began in the mid 90’s, they had fewer locations, but live animals on hand.

Perhaps in the digital age, it is just too analogue. Our attention spans, now too easily misguided, are unable to let us get lost in a physical space. To enjoy the Rainforest Cafe, one has to suspend some disbelief, and to do that, one must be present. 

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After returning from Minneapolis, I asked my parents what it felt like to bring us to The Rainforest Cafe in our youth. I expected them to say that it was a drag, and that all they remembered about it was some big fight by the waterfall, or that the flowing chocolate lava stained one of their favorite shirts. Something that echoed an adult sobriety, impervious to appreciating something so absurd. But no, they both said it was amazing there. They recalled with cheerful clarity the feat and excitement of it all. “If you sat all the way inside, really committed to being there, it would be pretty dark. It could actually feel like you were no longer at a restaurant,” my dad recalled to me over the phone. But more than the special effects and ambiance, they both said they loved it for my giddy reaction. 

Revisiting the scene of a memory is like going into a house of mirrors. The lighting is off, and what you see is not necessarily what you saw before. It’ll be a long while before I re-enter a Rainforest Cafe, if ever. The franchise is on its last leg. But I am no longer embarrassed, as I’d been since taking Olivia, to have once loved a now-dying thing. It used to be awesome, and now it sucks.