Universal Studios also recently unveiled the Toadstool Cafe at the new Super Nintendo World in Los Angeles, featuring a menu of Mario Brothers-inspired dishes like Piranha Plant Caprese and raspberry-filled Princess Peach cupcakes. The restaurant is designed to feel like you’re eating inside the video game. A giant red and white “super mushroom” frames the entryway, bright green “warp pipes” loom over the dining area, and clinking “coin boxes” are scattered about the room. Food media websites like Eater covered the opening with the same fervor of a new David Chang restaurant.
For a long time, food wasn’t a serious concern of theme restaurants, but unlike their predecessors, these new places are attracting top culinary talent. Brian Fisher, a James Beard Award nominee and Michelin-starred chef of Entente in Chicago, helmed the kitchen at a Saved By The Bell-themed pop-up Berry launched before he joined Bucket Listers in 2016. Before the restaurant opened, it had a waitlist of over 100,000 people and sold out every week for an entire year, according to Berry. Master Chef semifinalist Becky Brown created the Malibu Barbie Café menu, with dishes like pink hummus, CALI-flower bowls, and funfetti pancakes. The joy of cooking in these unorthodox environments appeals to many young chefs who are bored with the humdrum status quo. “I tell people all the time, I’m the luckiest chef in the world,” says chef Taylor Persh of her role as executive chef at 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in Vegas. “I get the opportunity to build crazy things and to live this fever dream every day.”
Dinner at 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea doesn’t come cheap ($355 per person), but the meal is closer in spirit to Eleven Madison Park than Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. Despite the many luxurious ingredients like black truffles and Wagyu on Persh’s menu, however, the two-and-a-half hour meal doesn’t exactly adhere to the conventions of a Michelin-starred restaurant. The first seven courses, for example, are served without silverware, inviting you to eat with your bare hands. An “Uni Kiss” arrives on a ceramic plate molded in the shape of Persh’s mouth (an alternate version of the now-infamous dish served at Bros’ in Lecce, Italy). Raising the plate to my lips, I slurp the lobe of uni from the chef’s outstretched tongue. Blueberry jam brushed over the molded lips lingers like fruity lip balm.
Moments before charred octopus tentacles parade through the dining room on sword-shaped skewers—evoking the giant squid attack from Verne’s novel—the lights above flicker and a dry ice mist rises from the floor beneath us. The first bite of smoky, tender octopus, which we gnaw off our swords like famished castaways, disabuses me of any lingering doubts I had that a fine dining theme restaurant was possible—or worth it.
A few hours after disembarking the submarine from my 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea dinner, I find myself seated at the same round table from the beginning of the night. This time, there are amber light bulbs floating on magnetic platforms around the perimeter. That ominously foreshadowed séance from earlier is about to begin. (Admission to the séance room and tickets for the spirits tasting are sold separately, but I couldn’t miss out.)
A woman professing to be a psychic medium begins to tell us a story about Thomas Edison’s failed attempt at popularizing talking dolls in the 1890s, before unlocking a rickety closet to reveal an original model. She delicately winds the crank on the back of the decrepit figure, unleashing a garbled recording from a miniature phonograph embedded inside its torso—one of the first recorded human voices in history. The room goes pitch black and a flashing strobe reveals the silhouette of a contorted human body swinging from an aerial hoop above us. When the lights come back up, I peer over at Davis, who surveys the room of startled onlookers with a satisfied smile on his face.
After the spirits in the room have been thoroughly exorcized (and consumed in liquid form, of course), we all get up to leave. I follow the parade of drunken revelers meandering aimlessly through the dark passageways in search of the exit, totally, gleefully lost. It’s not how most fine dining meals end, but that’s part of the pleasure. “If you knew how to escape,” says Davis, “It would take the fun out of it.”