Anyone interested in the ways that commercialized mass culture is transforming perceptions of nature will want to check this place out. It mixes simulation with reality, entertainment with education, and consumption with conservation. It makes an exuberant and wholly artificial spectacle of nature, even as it aspires to inform its customers about real and imperiled ecosystems. It uses animals for amusement and hopes to protect endangered species. It tempts us to eat and buy and asks us to reduce and recycle. It’s imaginative and fun, but it virtually sums up our confusion about what nature is and what we ought to do about it.

The Rainforest Cafe is the brainchild of Steven Schussler, an entrepreneur with a background in advertising and the restaurant business, the concept was seventeen years in development. For the last seven of those years, it existed as a prototype inside Schusslers’s home in St. Louis Park, Minnesota. Schussler had tropical birds as pets and says it was his desire to give them a cageless environment that inspired the Rainforest Cafe. ‘It became my passion to educate and entertain people about rain forests, which are the lungs of the world.’ The concept has been wildly successful popular and remunerative by mixing, as Shussler says, ‘the sophistication of a Warner Bros. store with the animation of Disney and the live animals of a Ringling Bros./Barnum and Bailey circus.’
The first Rainforest Cafe opened in late 1994 at the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, followed within the next two years by units at Woodfield Mall and Gurney Mills near Chicago; Disney Village in Orlando; and Tysons Corner, in McLean, Virginia. The chain is growing rapidly; units are scheduled to open this year in two international locations, London and Cancun, and seven domestic sites including Palisades Center in West Nyack, New York; Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City; South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa, California; and MGM Grand Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. The Rainforest Cafe is also slated to be the only sit down restaurant within Disney’s Animal Kingdom, a park currently under development in Orlando that will feature live animals in themed environments and that will be twice the size of Epcot Center.
Despite the range in locations, each unit is substantially the same, combining shopping and dining in a large space that is decorated and lit to simulate a fabulous jungle environment. Designs are created in house and drawn for the corporation by Cunningham Architects of Minneapolis. Retail merchandise is emblazoned with images of one of the chain’s ‘proprietary animal characters’, including Bamba, the gorilla; Nile, the crocodile; Iggy, the iguana; and Tuki Makeeta, the baby elephant. The food has won the most coveted form of praise: ‘Between sixty five and eighty five percent of our customers are repeat,’ says Schussler, ‘which is much higher than either Planet Hollywood or the Hard Rock Cafe.’
The Rainforest Cafe at Disney Village is the chain’s most elaborate to date. It is housed in a sixty five foot tall artificial mountain that steams and thunders at regular intervals. Water cascades down the outside, past real and artificial plants. Audioanimatronic animals, from butterflies and iguanas to giraffes, beckon to passersby. Inside, a cavernous space is divided into retail and restaurant areas by a huge, arched, saltwater tank containing simulated coral and real tropical fish. The bar is constructed to resemble a gigantic toadstool. Walls are fashioned of faux rock; artificial plants, vines and Spanish moss are draped from every nook and cranny. Water spills down the walls and is propelled from mist fountains. The ventilation system pumps into the air a ‘rain forest aroma’ developed by Aveda Corporation from natural floral extracts. Simulated tropical storms convulse the place every twenty two minutes, complete with flashing lights and deafening thunder. More audioanimatronics perform: Elephants trumpet and gorillas beat their chests. Meanwhile, real macaws and cockatoos are on exhibition for consumers’ edification – and potential purchase.
All in all the place is more jumble than jungle. While purporting to depict the rain forest, it creates a hodgepodge of different ecosystems, from ocean reef to savannah. Stirred into the pot are representatives of such non-rainforest species as zebras, giraffes and elephants. The mixing of environments makes the Rainforest Cafe more of a simulacrum than a simulation a copy for which there exists no precedent in the real world. As if that isn’t confusing enough, the place features a talking banyan tree named Tracy, who delivers the ultimate mind bender. At frequent intervals, she mouths exhortations to ‘reduce, reuse, and recycle,’ interspersed with invitations to try the tasty food or buy the themed merchandise. Conserve, conserve, conserve. Consume, consume, consume. Increasingly, as the Rainforest Cafe makes acutely clear, they are two sides of the same cultural currency.
But even this simulated cloud has a silver lining. Each Rainforest Cafe features a pool, complete with an animatronic crocodile, into which customers throw coins. These are collected and donated to groups with a focus on rainforest preservation, including the Rainforest Alliance, the Center for Ecosystem Survival, the Rainforest Action Network, and the World Wildlife Fund. Simulated rather than real coral is used in the fish tanks so as not to contribute to the destruction of living reefs. Only line caught fish are served, and the place tries not to purchase beef from deforested areas. The live animals are carefully tended: Each unit employs a full time curator (some with degrees in ornithology or marine biology) and a trained staff to tend to the fish and birds. The birds come from selected domestic breeding programmes, not from the wild. And Schussler says the corporation spends $175,000 per unit per year on outreach, taking the parrots out to schools and ‘educating children about the plight of the rainforest’.
In its evangelical stance the Rainforest Cafe is the latest variation of a centuries old phenomenon. Ever since the 1480s, when the Franciscan monk Fra Bernadino Caimi reproduced the shrines of the Holy Land at his Sacro Monte in Varallo, Italy, for the benefit of pilgrims who couldn’t make it to the real Jerusalem, people have been creating replicas of sacred places as a focus for popular devotional activity. As the century draws to a close, anxiety about the fate of the earth in general and of the rainforests in particular has arguably evolved into a kind of public religion. Endangered environments have become sacred terrain and their replicas – whether coral reefs at Sea World or rainforest habitats at aquaria and zoos – have become popular destinations in the ‘infotainment’ industry. Zoos with shops and shops with zoos: It’s becoming increasingly difficult to tell the difference. Visiting the Rainforest Cafe tells us a lot about how we express devotion in the late twentieth century. We visit a simulation and buy a souvenir.