Just as amusement parks have different rides, theme restaurants have different menus, but diners enter knowing what to expect. At the House of Blues, would-be soul food is served in a building with corrugated metal walls. Out-back offers meat and potatoes with an Australian accent. At Medieval Times, “serving wenches” bring the victuals as rowdy banqueters cheer jousting knights. At these people-pleasing places, customers leave with sated appetites as well as bags full of souvenir hats, T-shirts, and key rings to recall their happy experience.
While formulaic foodtainment seems like a post-Disney pop culture notion, it actually goes back to the Moorish and rococo cafeterias of the 1920s and Depression-era Hollywood, when profligate celebrities ignored hard times at merry movie colony restaurants with jungle and pirate decor. One called the Pirate’s Den featured mock floggings. At a hideaway called Don the Beach-comber, meals were served in palm-lined rooms, with water sprinkled on tin roofs to simulate tropical downpours. Inspired by Don’s success, “Trader Vic” Bergeron of Oakland conceived a virtual-reality Polynesian paradise in 1937 and transformed his raffish beer parlor, then called Hinky Dink’s, into the original Trader Vic’s. To this day, at Trader Vic’s in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and North America, you can still eat flaming pu-pu platters and drink extravagant rum potations to the beat of far-off tom-toms in escapist dining rooms of wicker, totem poles, and scowling tiki masks.
Restaurant Associates added epicurean ambition to the notion of a theme restaurant in the 1950s in such high-tone New York dining rooms as the Forum of the Twelve Caesars and Tower Suite. At the former, customers were made to feel like emperors, ordering orgiastic meals from a menu with Latin subtitles, drinking wine from goblets proffered by waiters dressed as Phoenician guards. A review in Gourmet magazine found it “hard to believe that there has ever been such completely perfect service anywhere—even in the palaces of the Caesars themselves.” Unlike today’s democratic theme restaurants, the Forum was a high-rollers’ haven, as was Restaurant Associates’ Tower Suite, in which the gimmick was penthouse dining: One was attended by a “personal” servant who introduced himself by name at the beginning of the meal—a flourish that eventually trickled down to annoy millions of diners in all sorts of restaurants.
The modern era of theme restaurants aimed at average palates and modest pocketbooks started in 1971. That is the year a good-times eatery called R.J. Grunt’s opened in Chicago. Grunt’s had no single theme, but it was a jolly place, its menu riddled with puns, its audacious salad bar the progenitor of all huge salad bars. Proprietor Rich Melman’s company, named Lettuce Entertain You, went on to open several personality-plus restaurants in Chicago, including Ed Debevic’s, which was christened for an imaginary blue-collar proprietor. That year was also when the first Hard Rock Café opened, in London, offering hamburgers and loud music to homesick Americans and curious Europeans. When Hard Rock came to New York in 1984, it added memorabilia to the formula, soon boasting that it was the world’s foremost rock-n-roll museum. Plastered with truckloads of stuff that once belonged to heart-throbs and hit-makers, and with a repertoire of nonstop tunes blasting through the chaos, Hard Rock became the defining theme restaurant of the late twentieth century, with branches nearly everywhere there were tourists. But of course the nexus of theme restaurants is Las Vegas, where everything, including the food, is meant to put customers into a state of dreamy fantasy. It could be argued that even the innumerable celebrity-chef eateries in Las Vegas reflect the theme restaurant concept, the theme in these cases being fine dining, with a menu and ambience meant to replicate the original experience that is somewhere else.