At its peak, Rainforest Cafe operated more than forty locations across the United States, Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, France, Japan, and beyond. It stretched from suburban food courts to the boardwalk at Atlantic City to the entrance of Disney’s Animal Kingdom. For a particular stretch of the 1990s, it was the most talked-about restaurant concept in the country. Today, roughly twenty-two locations remain.

The decline was not the result of one bad decision or a single owner who wrecked the thing. It happened the way a magic trick dies once you have seen behind the curtain, piece by piece, as the wonder that drove everything slowly stopped being enough to cover the cost of sustaining it. The story begins in a suburban house outside Minneapolis in 1989. A former advertising salesman named Steven Schustler had spent years kicking around the idea of a rainforest-themed restaurant, something immersive and theatrical, a place where a family could step into an entirely different ecosystem.

He had pitched it to investors, and they had not bitten. Nobody could picture from a stack of slides what it would actually feel like to eat a hamburger inside a tropical jungle. The thing that would eventually make Rainforest Cafe worth hundreds of millions of dollars was also the thing that made it almost impossible to fund, because the product was an experience, and experiences do not fit on a spreadsheet. Schustler, down to his last financial reserves, sold nearly everything he owned and began building the restaurant inside his own home.

Not a model or a prototype room, but the whole house. He painted the walls black and covered them in vines. He installed artificial waterfalls over custom-made rock formations. He wired in twenty sound systems running on thousands of extension cords that snaked through every room.

He filled the place with fog pumps, electric heaters, gas generators, and lighting rigs powerful enough to simulate a tropical afternoon. Then he added forty tropical birds, two tortoises weighing 150 pounds each, a baboon, an iguana, and a fleet of tropical fish in ten 300-gallon tanks. He was, in the most literal sense, living inside his pitch. It took three years and cost roughly $400,000, money he did not really have.

Eventually, a casino developer named Lyall Burman came to see it. Burman had made his money building destination entertainment complexes, at a moment when Americans were beginning to understand that what people paid for was an experience, not just a product. He had turned down Schustler before, but standing inside that house, with the waterfall in the kitchen and the fog rolling through the living room, something clicked. Burman invested $1.

2 million and came aboard as the first chairman and CEO. The state of Minnesota had just opened the largest shopping mall in the country, the Mall of America in Bloomington, and they were looking for anchor tenants that would give people a reason to drive an hour and make a day of it. The Rainforest Cafe opened its first location there on February 3, 1994. Within a week, the wait for a table was three hours.

The genius of the concept in those early years was that it had solved something genuinely hard. American families in the mid-1990s had a little more disposable income than they had a decade earlier, and they were eating out more. But the restaurant landscape was largely designed for efficient eating. The food arrived, you ate it, you left.

What nobody had built at that price point was a restaurant where the act of going out to eat was itself an event worth the drive and the wait. Rainforest Cafe was less a restaurant than a theme park that happened to serve food. The menu itself was honest American chain fare. Burgers, pasta, chicken dishes, coconut shrimp, the occasional steak.

The Python Pasta was penne in a Jamaican jerk cream sauce with grilled chicken, roasted red peppers, and scallions. It was good, but it was the kind of dish you could find at hundreds of other restaurants in any midsized American city. The food was not the draw, and the early Rainforest Cafe did not pretend it was. The draw was everything else.

A two-story building that looked like it had been grown from the floor of the jungle, covered in giant tropical leaves and lit from below in deep green and amber. A mechanical crocodile outside by the entrance fountain, snapping its jaws at passing children. A greeter in a safari jacket handing the kids a menu with a red-eyed tree frog on the cover. A gift shop full of stuffed gorillas and branded water bottles.

Inside, the ceiling disappeared into an artificial canopy strung with fiber optic lights simulating a night sky. Aquarium tanks were set into the walls, full of tropical reef fish. Animatronic gorillas sat on a rock formation, their eyes moving, their chests heaving with mechanical breath. In the early years, before budget pressures arrived, there were real parrots moving through the upper canopy.

The server would arrive and say, with what sounded like complete sincerity, “Your adventure is about to begin. ” And then, right when the food landed on the table, the whole restaurant changed. The lights dimmed. The sound shifted.

Something deep in the subwoofer array began to build. The gorillas beat their chests. Thunder crashed. The fog machines fired, and a fine mist drifted down over the dining room from hidden sprinklers.

Then it was gone, sunny again, the food there, the kids grinning the way kids grin when the world has just done something completely unexpected. For a few extraordinary years in the late 1990s, that product was worth an almost insane amount of money. The company went public in April 1995, raising $9. 5 million from the IPO and another $14.

2 million from warrants. The stock climbed from its asking price of $6 to the mid-teens within months. Individual locations were grossing upward of $15 million a year. In 1999, the chain’s last full year as an independent company, revenues reached $262.

69 million, nearly twenty times the revenue from just four years earlier. They were in London by the summer of 1997, inside the old Trocadero at Piccadilly Circus. They were at Disney Springs and at Disney’s Animal Kingdom, opening the day the park itself opened in April 1998. They were in Hong Kong, Cancun, and Disneyland Paris.

But the number of locations is a lagging indicator. It tells you how the business performed over the last several years, not how it is performing right now. By the time a location opens, eighteen months of planning and construction have already been paid for. The chain was still opening restaurants in 1998 and 1999 based on optimism baked in during the boom of 1995 and 1996.

But the boom had already quietly ended. The first great wound was built into the concept from the beginning. Rainforest Cafe was, by its very nature, a one-time destination for most of the people who went there. An ordinary successful restaurant lives on regulars, on the couple who comes in for pasta on Thursday nights, on the family who grabs a table after church.

A restaurant that does excellent business with first-time visitors but struggles to convert them to regulars is structurally a restaurant that has to continuously find new customers just to stay in place. Court records from the eventual acquisition put it with unusual candor: the units typically opened to high business volume followed by a decline in same-store sales after one year due to a lack of repeat business. Once was magical. Twice was fine.

Three times, the gorillas felt less urgent and the pasta felt more expensive. The second great wound was hiding in plain sight on the ledger sheet. Rainforest Cafe was one of the most expensive restaurants ever built per square foot in the history of American dining. The original Mall of America location cost approximately $1,000 per square foot to construct, a figure in theme park territory, not restaurant territory.

A single mechanical elephant cost upward of $20,000 to fabricate. The live birds cost around $100,000 per year just to feed and care for, requiring handlers and a filtration system approved by state and federal health officials. The complex computer systems required dedicated technical staff. Every thunderstorm, every thirty minutes, was a small engineering operation.

At a regular restaurant, the big costs are food and labor. At Rainforest Cafe, the building itself was a living cost. It needed constant maintenance, regardless of how many people were in the dining room. If foot traffic dropped thirty percent, the animatronics still had to be serviced, the fog machines run, the aquariums filled.

The experience was the product, and letting the experience slip to save money was the same as letting the food rot. But maintaining the experience at full pitch required the kind of revenue that only packed dining rooms could generate. The third great wound arrived in 2000, from the corporate world. Same-store sales had been declining at mall locations for two years.

The company took an $11. 5 million asset impairment and store closing charge in July 2000. The stock was in freefall. The company was burning through cash and had been unable to secure third-party financing.

Enter Landry’s Seafood Restaurants, a Houston-based company run by billionaire Tilman Fertitta. Landry’s originally offered around $125 million. That deal collapsed when the State of Wisconsin Investment Board, which owned a significant stake, publicly opposed it. By the time a second deal came together later in 2000, the offer had fallen to $75 million, all cash.

Landry’s paid $75 million for something that a few years earlier had been worth several times that on paper. Under Landry’s ownership, Rainforest Cafe did not get the reinvestment it needed. It was one brand inside a diversified portfolio, and the money that might have gone to new animatronics and upgraded sound systems went instead to the broader business. Slowly, quietly, the magic began to deteriorate.

The live parrots disappeared. Some fish tanks went dark or were removed. The gorillas’ movements got jerkier as servos wore down and were not replaced. The thunderstorm still happened, but the sound felt thinner, the mist a little sparse.

A reviewer years later wrote that Rainforest Cafe was made of magic in the nineties and early 2000s, and unfortunately, 1999 is exactly where the cafe stayed. The magic was not actively destroyed. It was left to run down, unoiled and unrepaired, while the rest of the restaurant business moved on. The children who had loved the place grew up.

The nine-year-old who lost her mind over the gorillas in 1997 was nineteen by 2007, and nineteen-year-olds do not drag their friends to the mall-based theme restaurant where they had birthday parties as children. And the malls were declining too, a slow bleed of anchor stores and foot traffic as big-box retailers moved to standalone locations and online shopping chipped away at the reasons to drive there in the first place. The entire economic model of the mall-based Rainforest Cafe depended on captured foot traffic, and as the shoppers stopped coming, the math got worse every year. By the mid-2000s, locations were closing with some regularity.

Aventura closed. Tyson’s Corner closed. The Chicago location on Michigan Avenue, one of the marquee urban flagship stores, closed in August 2020. The London Piccadilly Circus location, one of the great trophies of the international expansion, closed in 2022.

Among the closures was the one at Downtown Disney in Anaheim, which shut in June 2018. Disney closed one of its most beloved and highest-traffic homes to make way for a hotel expansion. The jungle, in other words, was removed to make way for a parking garage. At the peak, there were something like forty-five locations worldwide.

Today there are twenty-two. The chain now survives primarily at Disney properties, a handful of tourist destinations, and the single remaining Mall of America location, still running the thunderstorm every thirty minutes for children who have no idea what the place used to mean. The family at one of the remaining locations tonight is sitting down for the first time. The server is in the safari jacket.

The gorillas are up in the canopy breathing. The fiber optic ceiling is doing its slow imitation of a tropical night sky. The kids are scanning the room with the expression children get when the world offers them more than they were expecting. Then the lights change.

The sound deepens. The gorillas begin to beat their chests. The thunder arrives, and the mist comes down. For one brief, shining thirty seconds, the restaurant is exactly what it always was.

Abundant, magical, a little bit kitschy, completely unexpectedly alive. There used to be more than forty doors you could walk through to find that. Now there are twenty-two.