“You have to see it to believe it,” said my wife. She had just returned from one of her trolling sessions at our nearby mall, and what I had to see to believe was a new restaurant — a “theme restaurant,” called Rainforest.
Theme restaurants are nothing new, of course. From my own childhood I remember one with a cheesy plaster-of-Paris volcano in the center of the room that would periodically belch smoke and sparks. Another featured a Punch and Judy show. Puppets, volcanoes: nothing terribly elaborate; the idea — a wise one, as it turned out — was to pacify the antsy children and distract their parents from noticing the quality of the food.
But now we live in the age of perpetual uplift. Every story must have a moral, every amusement a higher purpose. If you’ve seen any children’s television programming lately, you know what I mean. Barney the dinosaur isn’t content to sing catchy ditties; they must simultaneously instruct the brats to brush their teeth, eat their vegetables, and look kindly on the cultures of other lands. In the age of perpetual uplift, everyone’s a hectoring schoolmarm, even purple dinosaurs, and you can’t escape the nagging.
In the same way, while it fills your belly and lightens your wallet, Rainforest the restaurant aims to raise your consciousness. The immediate theme, you needn’t guess, is the rainforest and the impending destruction thereof, due to the profligate tendencies of unchecked consumption. The rainforest, as patrons of a certain age will recall, was once known as the jungle, a dismal swamp of darkness and danger best avoided by all but the most intrepid explorers. Now it’s a burger joint, happy, frolicsome, air- conditioned, and bugfree: “an environmentally conscious family adventure,” as the menu instructs.
Bogus foliage sprouts from the walls and dangles from the ceiling. A large waterfall is lit with a neon sign: “Rescue the Rainforest.” Animatronic wildlife is everywhere. Fake macaws swing on their perches and squawk. At five-minute intervals, life-size gorillas begin to beat their breasts, rubber elephants raise their trunks and waggle their ears, drowsy leopards growl. The effect is deafening, not least because the uproar incites dozens of children to leave their tables to catch a better glimpse, hurtling themselves into the busboys and expectorating excitedly into your food.
When you are handed the menu, the uplift begins in earnest. Like so much environmental paraphernalia, the menu is an exercise in self-flattery and moral preening. It is printed — again, needless to say — “with environmentally friendly soybased inks” on “10 percent recovered fiber paper.” As for the burgers, “no beef was used from countries that deforest rainforest land to raise cattle.” The restaurant boasts that it uses “only line-caught fish big enough to have reproduced before it was harvested.” And the pizza? “Deep in the rainforest, the tribal experience was a communal offering of food. To assist in your experience, we have cut our pizzas as was done in the rainforest.” Yes, my son, whenever the Tasaday would phone Domino’s. . . .
Normally, strenuous efforts at New Age uplift are enough to send me spiraling into a funk, but I was unexpectedly un-depressed by Rainforest. By the time my meal was over, in fact, I was almost exhilarated. For stripped of its eco-pretensions, Rainforest is still, reassuringly, a tasteless family restaurant in the American style.
Around the tables the norteamericanos waited impatiently for their food, the jowly dads bursting the seams of their relaxed-fit Levi’s, the moms spilling out of their track suits, the plump kids fidgeting with smeary faces. The food itself comes in heaps, served on platters the size of Brazil. Here as elsewhere, lard seems to be the essential ingredient. And Rainforest operates on the principle central to all family restaurants: awesome waste. A single serving of dessert could keep the defensive line of the Detroit Lions in sugar shock for a week. The burgers weigh in at an inedible half-pound, and no one weeps for our bovine brothers and sisters who gave their lives that we might have a pointlessly large portion of their shanks, served on a toasted sesame-seed bun.
As you wobble out of the restaurant a rope line guides you into a retail shop offering all kinds of Rainforest-brand ticky-tacky: finger puppets, perfume, sweaters, T-shirts. Clerks swarm about like tsetse flies, dispensing wisdom about the rainforest and entreating you to buy, buy, buy. I made this discovery with enormous relief: Rainforest the restaurant is just another consumer con! Its proprietors might say they want to raise consciousness, but they really want to raise cash. The market overtakes all, conquers all, subsumes all — so that even anti-consumerism becomes an occasion to consume. This is not, I admit, a particularly uplifting message, but it’s better than the alternative.
ANDREW FERGUSON
