“If you know of the Rainforest Cafe, you probably know of it because there was one in your mall near your hometown that has probably since closed.”
-Eddy Burback, 2022
Since their 2022 YouTube videos, Eddy Burback and Ted Nivison’s visit to every Rainforest Cafe in North America have taken a permanent residence in my mind. Anyone that knows me is aware of my fascination with the restaurant chain, which could be seen as borderline obsessive. Yet, as I reminisce on my time spent deep within the rainforest, I am confronted with the knowledge that nothing lasts forever.
Like basically everyone else at GW, I am from New Jersey. While I don’t remember a time in my life where I wasn’t looking forward to leaving New Jersey. The Garden State is known for its various flora and fauna, and I was lucky to grow up just twelve minutes away from the premier example of it. A straight shot down Route One, you just had to make your way through hundreds of terrible drivers in the poorest designed parking lot on earth before you’d see it. Dull, corroded letters beckoning the children of America: THE RAINFOREST CAFE™.
For the uninitiated, The Rainforest Cafe is a chain restaurant designed to look like, well, a rainforest. Complete with animatronic animals, fake plants, aquariums filled with tropical fish, the cafe’s perhaps most famous for its thunderstorms every thirty minutes that are sure to make every child under five cry. If Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria can be seen as family-friendly franchise hell, and Chuck E Cheese as heaven, The Rainforest Cafe is purgatory.
No wonder I, whom a preschool teacher once described as an angry child, was drawn to its chaotic atmosphere. It was in the Edison, New Jersey Rainforest Cafe that I experienced some of my most formative memories. When I was five, I learned my fish, “Giraffe,” died, so my Nana bought me action figures of the restaurant’s animal mascots to make me feel better (from the gift shop, which was strategically placed in between the seating area and the only entrance/exit). I recall begging my mom to get me a Sparkling Volcano cake, and when she said no, staring in defiance at the stars projected onto a black and blue sky above my animal print chair.
According to my mother, our local Rainforest Cafe had “the worst food and service ever.” She probably would have liked the food better if she let me get that cake, but she wasn’t wrong about the service. We would usually have to wait an hour and a half after ordering before feasting on Jurassic Chicken Tidbits and Safari Fries. This delay was weird considering the only other customers were animatronic elephants and Tracy Tree.
Even as I aged I yearned for the rainforest. I would plead with my parents to take me, and settle for the Cheesecake Factory upon their refusal. In 2022, I was hit with a blast from the past when Youtuber Eddy Burback released a video to his channel titled “I ate at every Rainforest Cafe in the Country.” In the video, Burback and fellow youtuber Ted Nivison drive across North America over the course of three weeks visiting Rainforest Cafes (Nivison would release his perspective on his own channel). When I watched this video for the first of many times, I held my breath as Ted and Eddy rapidly approached Edison. What Eddy said shook me to my very core.
“We then drove all the way up to Edison, New Jersey to the saddest Rainforest Cafe I’ve ever seen. The employees at other Rainforest Cafes said this is the worst one, and you can tell by the sign outside, and the mall that it’s in”(27:09-27:20).
I felt like the statue of Atlas that stood at the back of the restaurant: the world was weighing down on my shoulders. What? No. My Rainforest Cafe was the worst? Surely not. Then I remembered that the other locations in the video included things like rollercoasters, Build-A-Bear Workshops, and live sharks, while the Edison one had to dispose of all its tropical fish because it couldn’t afford, leaving a bunch of empty tubes in the middle of the restaurant. I assume the employees turned them into Poppin Shrimp.
The restaurant’s position as the laughing stock of the internet now became my excuse for going to the Rainforest Cafe. I was only endorsing these childish flights of fancy ironically. It didn’t strike me until the restaurant was gone that I realized it was my friends I’d practically known for my whole life that I took with me, as if finally ordering that Sparkling Volcano cake would transport us back in time to when things were simpler. The food tastes better when you’re a kid.
One of my closest friends, Erica Bronfen, worked there in the late summer of 2024 as a hostess. I asked her for a few anecdotes. She told me that one time a man asked to sit where there were no kids, but didn’t want to sit at the bar. When she found him a seat away from children, he asked her “Is this really the best you can do?” The thrills of customer service. Hopeful families were also always asking about what happened to the fish, so she just started telling them they were transferred to the Rainforest Cafe in Seattle, which has since suffered the same fate as the one in Edison.
In their videos, Ted and Eddy explained that they chose to explore rainforest cafes because of the sheer number that were closing worldwide. Perhaps I should have heeded those words, because three years later, Erica shared the terrible news: the Menlo Park Mall’s Rainforest Cafe was closing. I am secure enough in my emotions to admit that I did, in fact, have to lie down after hearing that. The worst Rainforest Cafe in North America was gone, and with it my childhood.
I am completely aware that I sound like an angsty teenager ranting about the loss of her youth, but that’s because I am. I didn’t like New Jersey, but there were places in it I loved. The Barnes and Nobles two blocks from my house…which closed three years ago. Six Flags, and King Da Ka, the world’s tallest rollercoaster! Wait, they dismantled that last week. Maybe I’m one of those people who longs for change but can’t handle when the world changes around her. Would I be more okay with the loss of this, admittedly REALLY BAD, restaurant if I could’ve gone one last time, or would that have made it worse? When your child is crying during a thunderstorm, do you comfort them, or tell them to grow the fuck up? It’s gonna happen again in twenty minutes, anyway. Restaurants close. Time marches on. Yet, I can’t help but feel the Garden State has gotten a little less green.
