Forgotten ’90s Theme Restaurants That No Longer Exist

If you like eating mediocre food while surrounded by weird crap, there was no better time to be alive than the 1990s.

That’s when theme restaurants exploded, growing from a novelty into a  multimillion dollar industry. The enormous popularity of chains like the Hard Rock Cafe and Planet Hollywood inspired countless restauranteurs and wealthy financiers to try to launch their own themed dining empires.

Most of them failed — and failed quite spectacularly. Today almost all of them are gone, but they are not forgotten, as the following list of ten of the strangest defunct theme restaurants proves.

Before we begin, we must define the term “theme restaurant.” In my opinion, a place only becomes a true theme restaurant if it is inspired by something beyond the type of cuisine it served. Olive Garden serves Italian food, and its interior design, especially in its early years, featured plenty of Tuscan decor and rustic European ornamentation. That doesn’t make Olive Garden a theme restaurant. That makes it an Italian restaurant. There is a clear difference.

The ten theme extinct restaurants below, on the other hand, offered strange food in bizarre settings, sometimes accompanied by actors, animatronics, and even the occasional simulator ride. (Man, I miss the days when you could get jostled around on fake space flight to Mars before you ate some soylent green salads.) Here are 10 theme restaurants from the ’90s that no longer exist. (RIP.)

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