Minnesota Is Home To A Restaurant Chain That Now Has Only A Few Locations Left

As a kid, I can remember thinking how cool this restaurant seemed. Now, Minnesota is home to only one of a small handful left worldwide.

On trips to the Twin Cities as a kid, we'd often end up paying a visit to the Mall of America in Bloomington. Young me and my siblings would be fascinated by the thunder, rain sounds, and hidden creatures every time we walked by the Rainforest Cafe.

It is a pretty cool concept, isn't it?

Something I didn't know as a kid is that the Mall of America Rainforest Cafe was actually the first location to open, welcoming guests in 1994 to their original first-floor space in the mall before moving to their current third-floor MOA spot.

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If you've never been there, here's a video tour from a vlogger that shows off the experience and gives a little history of their time at the mall.

We never convinced our parents to go when we were young, but adult me has had the opportunity to check out the one in the Twin Cities as well as the one in Vegas.

In its heyday, the Minnesota location at the Mall of America was one of nearly 60 Rainforest Cafes.

Themed restaurants like Rainforest Cafe or the Mall of America Planet Hollywood (which closed in 2003)  were kind of fascinating to me as a kid.

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While Planet Hollywood didn't enjoy the same fate, Rainforest Cafe has hung in strong as a feature now on "restaurant row" at the MOA. That hasn't been the case for roughly two-thirds of their worldwide locations, though.

Rainforest Cafe once had 59 restaurants. Since then, the numbers have dwindled significantly.

There are now only 22 locations worldwide, with 16 of them being in the United States. Most of the remaining US locations are at tourist destinations like the one at the Mall of America in Minnesota, at Disney World, or in Las Vegas.

So if a novel dining experience is what you're after, we're still in luck here in Minnesota to have one of the few remaining locations of this themed restaurant brand.