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| - Restaurants that have you exit through the gift shop are a curious sort of place to dine. That someone thinks a restaurant even needs a gift shop might have some of the youngin's on Yelp confused (as opposed to immediately suspect).
"Zowie, Uncle Karl, are there dining experiences so amazing that you really want to buy a tshirt to let everyone know you supped there?"
The short answer is "no". The long answer is still "no" but gather round, padawans, for another one of Uncle Karl's tales of 1990s horror. Bill Clinton was in the White House, a young Will Ferrell was teaching America to laugh, and people were seemingly growing tired of dining and then seeing a show, preferring to get back to their VHS systems and AOL.
What if you could combine dining with some of the aspects of theater? Surely, Americans would flock to your door. The great thing about capitalism is it doesn't take much of an idea, or an idea at all, to set off a flurry of competition.
Rainforest Cafe, of which this Yelp review is about, is the sole remaining survivor of the great Themed Restaurant bubble of the 1990s. We had Planet Hollywood, Fashion Cafe, Harley-Davidson Cafe, Copperfield's Magic Underground, the Star Trek Experience Bar and Manatee's Coastal Sea Life Aquarium on a Plate.
Most of these places went bust by the latter part of the millennium when it became apparent the market for $14 hamburgers served with potato chips was limited or might not have outright existed. Staring at a glass display case containing the sari Ben Kingsley wore in Gandhi really doesn't make your burger taste any better, no matter what a marketing guru in a pastel blazer (http://www.wallpaperbase.com/wallpapers/movie/miamivice/miami_vice_2.jpg) tells you.
So the question remains why the Rainforest cafe survived the Great and Horrible Themed Restaurant Contraction of 2000. You still get a $14 burger that comes with potato chips. There's a $1 extra option for fries. Maybe that saved them. While kids no doubt have no clue why an adult would want to, or should, get excited about dining next to a display case containing Tom Cruise's first pair of Wayfares or a guitar signed by the members of Chalk Circle, an animatronic monkey on a swing that lights up every fifteen minutes is pure crack to an 8 year old.
The children like this place. I guess. If you don't like dining with children, or prefer to simply dine on them, you might want to give this place a pass. If you have kids and have never considered the wisdom of turning them into a ready source of protein, this might be cheaper than a day at Wonderland.
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