Restaurant Thinktank
Rainforest Café founder tweaks seven new theatrical food concepts.
Susan H. Fishman

While many restaurateurs are busy perfecting their one winning concept, Steve Schussler, creator of Rainforest Café, is hunkered down in his “laboratory,” researching more than a handful of new restaurant ideas at once. The master juggler currently has seven bigger-than-life themed restaurant concepts in the works that will burst into major markets early next year. Eleven full-time employees have been mad at work in the company's warehouse in Minneapolis for 5 years, experimenting with everything from Paris in the 1940s to the Ching Dynasty.

“Some companies have a test kitchen in their corporate headquarters, but none have built and furnished and manned a laboratory that has been in business for R&D exclusively for 5 years,” says Schussler, who thinks the phrase “diversify your portfolio” extends beyond the financial world. In fact, it's why the tireless entrepreneur decided to sell his original venture, Rainforest Café, to Landry's Seafood Restaurants and form Schussler Creative in 2000 — so he could tackle a variety of projects at one time.

The first concept that Schussler Creative will open will be T-Rex, a dinosaur-themed destination restaurant.

Diversification is also what inspires Schussler's multi-level team, which can work on four or five projects simultaneously. Their ideas come mainly from focus groups and are followed up with extensive research and design. Schussler and his group have been researching dinosaurs for 12 years for the company's first concept, T-Rex, a restaurant and retail concept with a theatrical dinosaur theme. Built around themes of water, fire and ice, T-Rex recreates different environments in which dinosaurs existed. Each environment will be enhanced with life-sized animatronic dinosaurs, which come to life in waterfalls, geysers and ice caves. It's what Schussler calls “edutainment” and, like some of his other new concepts, will offer things like field trips, guest speakers and retail stores. Schussler is also working on bringing in major retail players, such as LG Electronics Inc., to provide flat-screen TVs for dinosaur education, and Land Rover, to put an SUV in every T-Rex restaurant.

Aerobleu represents an era of jazz and mystique from 1939 to 1959.   Unlike the smoky red carpeted, underground jazz rooms; Aerobleu's creator and designer, Brooks Branch, says Schussler Creative has recreated a marvelous setting that pays homage to the style and grace of the most elegant period of music and décor in the modern era. Aerobleu will attract jazz lovers and musicians from around the world.

“People are always questioning the viability of themed restaurants because of the Planet Hollywoods falling out of grace,” says Schussler. “They think you're spending more time on theatrics than on good quality food, but that couldn't be further from the truth. I like to say that our guests come once for the ‘wow' factor, but they come back for good quality food and service.”

For example, T-Rex will feature three varying and unique methods of cooking, including stone-seared cooking (cooking on a stone that's 5 feet above ground with 12 inches of flame all the way around it so every inch of the flame has the same temperature), flame-seared cooking and heat-seared cooking. There will also be an open kitchen, which is rarely, if ever, found in a themed restaurant. The food will take on an element of each individual restaurant theme, in both presentation and in the actual items themselves, such as a meat loaf served up with an attitude by a Renaissance character donning the regalia of the period.

“It's important that the palate, the nose and the eye meet,” notes Schussler.

The restaurants will also cater to vegetarians, as well as non-vegetarians, and will accommodate people with special food requirements (due to allergies and intolerance).

And to bring in those customers, only the hottest locations in the world will do. They will have a minimum of 15 million visitors, will be high-trafficked and will be multi-diverse in terms of education, income, gender and race. Schussler likes to say the demographic profile is “from age 3 to 103.” For the most part, the company is looking for freestanding locations that are high tourist attractions and have significant retail. It's also extremely important to find sites and landlords that will help the company keep down the level of expenditures.

“It's extremely expensive to run one of these,” notes Schussler. “We have more personnel, with curators, educators, historians, authors — it's a whole different level of looking at the business. So that means that a landlord has to look at us differently — not just as an attraction. For example, T-Rex is an attraction that happens to have a restaurant and a retail store, but we're not looking at those things as afterthoughts.”

So far, Schussler plans to take his new concepts to Los Angeles, Orlando, New York, Las Vegas and Minnesota. He plans to limit the number of locations to two or three for some of the concepts and, typically, no more than eight for others.

“I think that sometimes limiting your growth is also healthy,” he notes.