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Aug 03, 2023

Theme Restaurants Are Making a Major Comeback

By Adam Reiner Sixteen of us are sitting in a circle around a giant mahogany table waiting for our dinner reservation. We’ve each been escorted through a maze of dark, shadowy hallways to a room

By Adam Reiner

Sixteen of us are sitting in a circle around a giant mahogany table waiting for our dinner reservation. We’ve each been escorted through a maze of dark, shadowy hallways to a room bathed in crimson light. “Are you staying for the séance tonight?” a man standing in the corner of the room asks, grinning mischievously. Judging from everyone’s blank expressions, nobody got the memo about a séance. We were warned that dinner would involve imbibing high-ABV spirits. No one mentioned anything about conjuring supernatural ones.

After a stiff welcome drink, a host marches us one by one like captives past a sign that reads “Submarine Tours This Way” and into a cavernous dining room with teal lanterns that rappel down from the ceiling. Archways with elaborate wood carvings resembling muscular waves encircle a long rectangular table set for dinner. Along the far wall, a mural of a giant octopus with a terrifyingly human face watches over us.

We’ve all come to dine at 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The quixotic fine dining restaurant, inside the Lost Spirits Distillery in Las Vegas, features a carefully orchestrated 16-course tasting menu. The dishes are inspired by each chapter of Jules Verne’s 1870 adventure novel of the same name, which chronicles the macabre underwater adventures of Captain Nemo and his unwitting prisoners aboard a handcrafted submarine.

Bryan Davis, the sinister-looking man from the waiting room, and his wife, Joanne Haruta, opened their restaurant in Las Vegas in March 2022, and since then, the 16-seat dining room regularly sells out two nightly seatings, months in advance. Along with 20,000 Leagues, other experiential restaurants have started popping up across the country, like the Super Mario Brothers–themed Toadstool Cafe at Universal Studios in Los Angeles, Malibu Barbie Cafés in New York and Chicago, and Karen’s Diner, which started in Sydney, Australia, and is now headed Stateside, with existing locations across the UK, Canada, and Indonesia.

These whimsical new places are examples of what was once a dying breed: theme restaurants. Unlike restaurants that act as period pieces, capturing a feeling from a bygone era—culinary destinations like Joe Baum’s ancient Rome-themed Forum of the Twelve Caesars (which closed in 1975) or Major Food Group’s Rat Pack simulation Carbone—these theme restaurants are purposely kitschy and larger than life. They build interactive experiences around one unifying—and often intentionally zany—theme. Many of these concepts are distinctly performative.

The genre had a heyday in the ’90s, when places like Planet Hollywood and Rainforest Cafe were thriving in most major American markets. But by the early 2000s, substandard food and stale concepts slowed their momentum. “My wife and I actually went on one of our first dates in our 20s at a Rainforest Cafe in San Francisco,” says Davis. That location on Fisherman’s Wharf went out of business in 2017.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what caused the decline of theme restaurants in the early aughts. The novelty of celebrity-driven concepts like Planet Hollywood and Hard Rock Cafe, which capitalized on the public’s fixation with celebrity culture, fizzled as social media opened a more intimate, real-time window into celebrities’ lives. The kitchens in these restaurants also produced largely mediocre food and lacked the talent and creativity to evolve with changing appetites. Last year, one of New York City’s oldest theme restaurant institutions, Jekyll & Hyde, closed its doors permanently after a 31-year run in Manhattan’s West Village. The restaurant cited bankruptcy, after it was unable to pay $7.5 million to creditors and $1.5 million of back rent.

But now, as the public emerges from its pandemic-induced haze, the experiential dining trend is raging back. People are hungry for colorful, transportive experiences that get them out of their living rooms and into alternate realities. This time, though, with the help of social media, theme restaurants are able to build excitement on platforms like TikTok and Snapchat, adding fuel to the FOMO. They serve higher quality food developed by pedigreed chefs and, in many cases, operate as pop-ups, a more efficient approach than the permanent installations of the past.

Aden Levin, the cofounder of Sydney-based event production company Viral Ventures, believes recent nostalgia for the ’90s has created a tailwind for his company’s themed dining concepts. Viral Ventures began rolling out its wildly popular Karen’s Diner across Australia in October 2021, and plans to launch pop-ups in 25 American cities including New York, Las Vegas, and Austin before the end of the year. The surly staff inside these retro diners are prototypical entitled “Karens” who mock vegans, eat french fries off people’s plates, and flip you the bird on your way out. “It doesn’t matter if you’re Gordon Ramsay or Joe Bloggs, you get the same shit-talk from our staff,” says Levin. “Everybody’s equal under the rule of Karen.” The playful abuse is reminiscent of restaurants like Ed Debevic’s and Dick’s Last Resort that pride themselves on rude service, but Karen’s introduces interactive elements that take the ornery shtick a step further.

Levin stresses how customer engagement—there are lip-sync battles, fashion parades, and dance-offs—sets Karen’s apart from the static Hard Rock Cafe–type theme restaurants of the past. Gamifying the experience encourages people to get off their phones and on their feet—while providing plenty of fodder for social media too. Customers can try their luck spinning Karen’s “Wheel of Misfortune,” in which a wrong turn might result in their party being ejected from the restaurant for a full 10 minutes.

The goal in these themed environments is to get diners off their phones and make them feel immersed in an experience. Still, the resurgence of theme restaurants owes in large part to social media. Derek Berry, an executive at Bucket Listers, an online portal for entertainment experiences, believes that the current wave of theme restaurants can channel the power of social media more efficiently than those of the past, spreading digital word of mouth and reaching a broader audience.

Immersive experiences like my dinner at 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea are tailor-made for selfies, viral TikTok clips, and Instagram videos. Throughout the meal, my tablemates discharged their smartphones like paparazzi as each course arrived. When a whole-roasted pig’s head emerged from the kitchen hoisted on a giant gurney, the entire table stood up to capture the servers carrying it to a tableside altar. Once the chef was finished dissecting it, I couldn’t resist standing up to take a close-up of the pig’s mangled skull and glistening snout.

Major companies have caught on to the social media potential of these theme restaurants as a way to promote products—or even new movies. Bucket Listers—which creates lucrative partnerships with established media brands—joined forces with toy company Mattel this year to design special Malibu Barbie Cafés that strategically opened in New York and Chicago ahead of the release of the new Barbie movie with Ryan Gosling and Margot Robbie.

The luminescent dining spaces are meant to evoke the beachside energy of ’70s Malibu, with pastel-colored surfboards suspended from the rafters and signature Barbie-pink palm trees adorning the walls. Berry hopes to entice customers to dine with their phones out by creating Instagrammable moments, like a life-size Barbie Doll box you can stand inside and an artificial sand-laced beach with Adirondack chairs for taking selfies after your meal.

Universal Studios also recently unveiled the Toadstool Cafe at the new Super Nintendo World in Los Angeles, featuring a menu of Mario Brothers–inspired dishes like Piranha Plant Caprese and raspberry-filled Princess Peach cupcakes. The restaurant is designed to feel like you’re eating inside the video game. A giant red-and-white “super mushroom” frames the entryway, bright green “warp pipes” loom over the dining area, and clinking “coin boxes” are scattered about the room. Food media websites like Eater covered the opening with the same fervor of a new David Chang restaurant.

For a long time, food wasn’t a serious concern of theme restaurants, but unlike their predecessors, these new places are attracting top culinary talent. Brian Fisher, a James Beard Award nominee and Michelin-starred chef of Entente in Chicago, helmed the kitchen at a Saved By The Bell–themed pop-up Berry launched before he joined Bucket Listers in 2016. Before the restaurant opened, it had a waitlist of over 100,000 people and sold out every week for an entire year, according to Berry. MasterChef semifinalist Becky Brown created the Malibu Barbie Café menu, with dishes like pink hummus, CALI-flower bowls, and funfetti pancakes. The joy of cooking in these unorthodox environments appeals to many young chefs who are bored with the humdrum status quo. “I tell people all the time, I’m the luckiest chef in the world,” says chef Taylor Persh of her role as executive chef at 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in Vegas. “I get the opportunity to build crazy things and to live this fever dream every day.”

Dinner at 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea doesn’t come cheap ($355 per person), but the meal is closer in spirit to Eleven Madison Park than Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. Despite the many luxurious ingredients like black truffles and Wagyu beef on Persh’s menu, however, the two-and-a-half hour meal doesn’t exactly adhere to the conventions of a Michelin-starred restaurant. The first seven courses, for example, are served without silverware, inviting you to eat with your bare hands. An “Uni Kiss” arrives on a ceramic plate molded in the shape of Persh’s mouth (an alternate version of the now-infamous dish served at Bros’ in Lecce, Italy). Raising the plate to my lips, I slurp the lobe of uni from the chef’s outstretched tongue. Blueberry jam brushed over the molded lips lingers like fruity lip balm.

Moments before charred octopus tentacles parade through the dining room on sword-shaped skewers—evoking the giant squid attack from Verne’s novel—the lights above flicker and a dry ice mist rises from the floor beneath us. The first bite of smoky, tender octopus, which we gnaw off our swords like famished castaways, disabuses me of any lingering doubts I had that a fine dining theme restaurant was possible—or worth it.

A few hours after disembarking the submarine from my 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea dinner, I find myself seated at the same round table from the beginning of the night. This time, there are amber light bulbs floating on magnetic platforms around the perimeter. That ominously foreshadowed séance from earlier is about to begin. (Admission to the séance room and tickets for the spirits tasting are sold separately, but I couldn’t miss out.)

A woman professing to be a psychic medium begins to tell us a story about Thomas Edison’s failed attempt at popularizing talking dolls in the 1890s, before unlocking a rickety closet to reveal an original model. She delicately winds the crank on the back of the decrepit figure, unleashing a garbled recording from a miniature phonograph embedded inside its torso—one of the first recorded human voices in history. The room goes pitch-black and a flashing strobe reveals the silhouette of a contorted human body swinging from an aerial hoop above us. When the lights come back up, I peer over at Davis, who surveys the room of startled onlookers with a satisfied smile on his face.

After the spirits in the room have been thoroughly exorcized (and consumed in liquid form, of course), we all get up to leave. I follow the parade of drunken revelers meandering aimlessly through the dark passageways in search of the exit, totally, gleefully lost. It’s not how most fine dining meals end, but that’s part of the pleasure. “If you knew how to escape,” says Davis, “It would take the fun out of it.”