#themed restaurants

[lizardsfromspace]

Friends, we have failed at our attempt to make Cracker Barrel woke, the primary goal of the left. Thus we must remake another classic themed restaurant in our image (woke). Here's my proposal:

[tonyfurret]

It feels like everything has gotten so bland and gray minimalist. Even kids places

Like if this didn’t say where a kid can be a kid, you’d have no idea it was a Chuck E. Cheese

I think that’s why I love the rainforest cafe so much. It’s colorful, loud and over the top. Images can’t properly capture the sure SCALE of it all, the interior, the animatronics

I love the way the mall ones look like they’re spilling out into the rest of the normal looking building. Birds flying out as the vines cover the ceiling. I wanna go back so bad. My first time going is no joke probably up there with my happiest moments ever.

[iwilldiedelighted]

Café Odyssey (Bloomington, Minnesota)

Café Odyssey was a themed restaurant located inside the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, from 1998 to 2000. It featured multiple dining sections, including a safari area, the ruins of an ancient Peruvian city, and Atlantis. Beyond large-scale props and decorations, the rooms also featured screens and projections related to their area’s theming. Non-dining areas included the “Journey’s End” gift shop and Explorer’s Club Bar, which showcased a giant globe guests could sit inside. At the time of its opening, it was the largest restaurant in Mall of America. In 2000, the restaurant was sold and closed.

[diaspora-transan]

We need more themed restaurants. (Also we need the working class to be significantly better paid so they can afford to eat at and enjoy themed restaurants, but that's a separate issue.)

I remember visiting family in Kansas City when I was a youth and visiting the T-Rex Cafe. That place was cool as hell. It had massive animatronics, it had a huge water feature outside with animatronic dinos in it, the entrance was covered by a massive dino skeleton, it had mood lighting, it had different themed zones, it had a massive octopus bar, the jungle area had animatronic insects that were like 2ft long, it had a build-a-dino plushie section in their gift shop area, it had woolly mammoths, it had fake meteorshowers every 20 or so minutes, it had pretty decent if rather pricy food. It closed in 2017. I miss it deeply.

Remember the Rainforest Cafe? That shit was pretty cool (tho not t-rex cafe cool). They had live fish, and a fake sky with stars, and animatronic animals, and sooooo much fake foliage. Haven't seen another restaurant that green. I'm still a lil confused by why they had elephants in there, but I'm not complaining, elephants are cool as hell. There isn't a Rainforest Cafe anywhere near me anymore and they've been going downhill for a while.

Y'all ever been to a theme park, and been to one of their good restaurants? I remember going to Universal Studios when I was a teenager and they had this cool as hell steampunk themed restaurant. It was too expensive for our family to get a full meal there, but we got deserts and eyeballed their candy section jealously. I remember going to Disney World as a young kid and visiting many of their restaurants and hotels, and many of them were really cool and well themed. As an adult, I don't think I'll ever afford going back to Disney or Universals.

I remember driving through Colorado and visiting this cool as fuck restaurant called Casa Bonita. They had a massive water fountain with a pool at the bottom in a jungly area, and when I visited they had a performer who did dive into the pool from the fountain area as part of his routine. They had an arcade and weird caves you could explore. The whole place was themed gorgeously. It's still open, and I desperately need to visit again.

Themed restaurants are cool as fuck and I want one within walking distance thanks

Image IDs are in the alt text, but also available below the cut.

Image 1: Photo taken inside the T-Rex Cafe in Kansas City. Photo is taken in the ocean themed section, with blue lighting, jelly fish hovering above, a water textured ceiling, blue water-textured floor, a fake coral reef back wall, and a large fish tank. The tables appear to have fossil designs on them, and the chairs are plain blue. In the background you can see the jungle/rainforest section. It has a LOT of hanging foliage and fake trees. [End ID]

Image 2: Photo of the Rainforest Cafe at Disney Springs. The ceiling is covered in fake foliage, as is the back wall. Other walls are covered by fake rock. There are three elephants peaking out through the foliage, and a couple of parrots suspended from the ceiling. The tables have various rainforest scenes printed on them, and the chairs appear to be made of thick sticks. [End ID]

Image 3: Exterior photo of the Toothsome Chocolate Emporium in Universal Studios Orlando. The building has massive black and gold smoke stacks on top, large copper piping, a massive black tank, and other decorative machine parts. The main building is a light colored brick and large windows with black bracing. There are large gears above the entrance and below the main sign with the restaurant's name. There is additional gold signage reading "Dessert Foundry" in all caps, "Food and Spirits" in all caps, and "Candy Smith" in title case above different sections of the restaurant. [End ID]

Image 4: Photo of Casa Bonita with a light blue pool with a waterfall surrounded by rocks and fake palm trees. There are bridges and rope and wood catwalks for performers and guests to use around the pool.

[lizardsfromspace]

Ideas for themed restaurants that *could* have existed during the themed restaurant boom, but didn't:

A RnB themed restaurant; if you send an order back to kitchen, your waiter turns on rain effects above him, throws his arms wide, and begs you to tell him how a perfect meal goes wrong. "Please come back, girl, for two-for-one-apps during shrimpfest in July."

[lizardsfromspace]

It's not quite a themed restaurant - okay, I guess Cracker Barrel is themed to America before the Civil Rights Act (which is not a joke, there is a heading called "civil rights cases" on their Wikipedia page) - but it was a restaurant with an aesthetic & anyway Cracker Barrel is minimalist now apparently?

This is as soulless and cheap as any redesign of its kind but also people are trying to add a political dynamic to it? That this redesign is trying to make Cracker Barrel appeal to liberals?

And maybe but let's be real here. This kind of faux-rustic hollowness is far more representative of the #tradwife #aesthetic and the suburban LARPers on Instagram than any charming cornpone collection of good ol' country stuff. This is the kind of restaurant a guy who rides a gigantic, spotless pick-up to and from the office wants to go to when he wants to go to somewhere "country". Not somewhere with fish and sepia photographs on the walls or any other kind of charm

[lizardsfromspace]

Trying to find examples of themed restaurants (& etc.) outside of the US/Canada/UK & the coverage is so bad. Obv bc coverage is spotty in English - and sometimes there isn't much coverage in the original language, either - but also it's just. Bad in all the ways Western media discussing other countries is bad

One that keeps coming up is this one in Beirut: Buns and Guns, a military themed restaurant that was covered widely as a niche curiosity in 2008. I don't think it lasted much beyond that, but I can't find much information beyond that initial flurry of stories

Written coverage of this, naturally, plays up exoticism, talking about the Situation in Lebanon, and noting the veils worn by female patrons. They talk about how strange it is to have a restaurant themed to war & play up that it was in an area controlled by Hezbollah to imply that it was, like, a Hezbollah themed restaurant

So anyway this is Mission BBQ. It is a military-themed American chain. Every day at noon, every location (142+!) does this

Some locations have this out front

And like, don't get me wrong: a restaurant themed to the military with menu items named after weapons is bizarre and novel no matter the context. But nobody's lavishing attention on Mission BBQ, a chain of over a hundred restaurants that demands a literal loyalty ritual from patrons every single day. Nobody's writing articles called "restaurant in MAGA-controlled Florida demands patrons pledge loyalty to leader, complicating the the Situation in America"

[lizardsfromspace]

Okay so today I watched a four part history of themed entertainment in the 90s by the Youtube channel Poseidon Entertainment (the first part is here, there doesn't seem to be a playlist) and it had many bonkers moments of history. Here are some of them:

The MGM theme park in Las Vegas was not allowed to use any MGM films or even the lion in their logo, bc of the terms of mutual lawsuits between MGM and Disney (MGM was mad they licensed their name to a theme park - Disney-MGM Studios - and Disney operated it as a movie studio also, Disney was mad MGM opened a theme park while licensing their name to theirs)

Fashion Cafe was founded by a man named Tommaso Buti, along with his brother. He pretended super models were co-owners of the restaurant (in reality they were just promised profit shares in return for appearing at the opening) and in 1998 it came out that Fashion Cafe had gone months without paying taxes. It shut down later that year, and (this isn't in the video but I'm learning it now) Buti was able to parlay his connections from his short-lived failed fashion-themed restaurant into a gig running Donald Trump's modeling agency. He was later brought up on charges of massive fraud used to fund Fashion Cafe, but was pardoned on the last day of Donald Trump's first term

The founder of Rainforest Cafe, to prove the chain's viability, built a proto-Rainforest Cafe in his house, and the unusual energy use from running a fake jungle full of robot animals in his house got the cops investigating him on suspicion he was making drugs

Anyway go watch it I guess