The Rainforest Cafe

Aboard a rickety swiftboat, my family and I braved the jungle depths, slowly floating towards the very heart of darkness and a stark examination of the thin line between rational thought and ravenous hunger. Our mission: to find tabled seating away from the cybernetic gorilla. Claire is deathly afraid of the bionic mongoloid, to the point where she does nothing but quiver in her seat, food untouched and dinner conversation unheard. I covertly attempted to get seated next to the gorilla for this very reason, but Wifezilla insisted we NOT deliberately scare our little girl.

While dining at The Rainforest Cafe, one does not blanch at $9 hamburgers or $6 kid-sized mac 'n cheese. Jungle exploration comes not cheaply. $4 of that $9 hamburger goes towards juicing up that elephant head so it can periodically flap its ears and raise its trunk. To the delight of safari patrons engorged on surf 'n turf, baby-back ribs, and icy smoothies with cleverly entitled jungle motifs. If you're too cheap to pay the ambiance tax, Chili's has a roughly equivalent menu sans the hided robots and blistering light show.

While puttering down that Amazonian-like river, my mouth stuffed with a medium seared New York strip and the Viet Cong placidly firing machine-guns from ashore, I looked around our table and wondered why people who didn't have kids were at this restaurant. I was currently eating the food there and could vouch it not good enough to dine there if you didn't have to. I nearly mustered the bored resolve to ask a nearby childless couple why they were there rather than at a real restaurant. But I had finished all my steak. My shrimp, grilled and fried, was long gone too. With all the blood in my body conventioning in my stomach, my brain went blissfully offline and I lost all interest in the dining motivations of my fellow safari explorers.

Until I got the bill. Coincidentally, the assembly-line jungle comes alive when I open the faux black leather receipt carrier and spy the grand total. The tiger growls, the chimp gibber, the gorilla pounds his chest, the elephant trumpets, the father whimpers "The horror . . . the horror."