That’s because Jacques is a robot. Or, rather, an actor playing a robot in a costume made of random clamps, clasps and metal hands, with leather overalls in various shades of cocoa and a bowler cap. His voice, filtered through an unseen distortion device, sounds a little tinny. If the innards of a vintage timepiece had been blown up, fashioned into human form and given a workman’s coating, it‘d probably look something like Jacques. Ask to take his picture, and he’ll likely apologize for blinking, though he has no pupils or eyelids. His eyes are constructed out of metal cups.
When he’s not making the rounds from table to table, often with his female pal Penelope, the purported proprietor of Toothsome, Jacques is seen on screens—meant to be windows—in the back of the restaurant, hovering over the action amid oversized gears and tubes.
One’s tolerance for being interrupted by a fake robot while dining out is likely dependent on a few factors. The presence of children in the party likely helps, as does one’s feelings about formative trips to theme parks. But prime weekend reservations tend to fill quickly at Toothsome, the new steampunk-themed restaurant in CityWalk at Universal Studios Hollywood. Is it an indication that there’s a dearth of family-friendly theatricality around the dinner table? Or a sign that the themed restaurant, which enjoyed an era of expansion throughout the 1980s and ‘90s with the Hard Rock Cafe, Planet Hollywood and many more, is ready for a proper comeback?
Well, that depends how one defines a themed restaurant.
“A themed restaurant would be an artifice of another place brought artificially to life,” says Craig Hanna, chief creative officer of themed entertainment firm the Thinkwell Group, which has worked with clients across the entertainment business. “This goes all the way back to when immigrants started coming to the United States and were trying to relive the place they left behind. You could go back further.”
Hanna does, discussing the World’s Fairs of the 1890s and their European-inspired façades and interiors. Even earlier, at the start of the 12th century, China had restaurants with singing waiters. And, of course, there was the theatrical restaurant culture of Paris in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Eddie Sotto, formerly of Walt Disney Imagineering, the company’s arm devoted to theme park experiences, and a designer who worked on numerous L.A. restaurants including John Sedlar’s shuttered but acclaimed Rivera, takes us to the Parisian countryside in the mid to late 1880s, where there were treehouse-themed restaurants inspired by the novel “Robinson Crusoe.”
“I have an engraving in my home, from the magazine L'Illustration, of people having Champagne cocktails in this Robinson family treehouse,” Sotto says. “In places like Paris, they would have themed events in the catacombs and people would dine there. Theater and dining go back a long way together.”
Southern California has its own storied history when it comes to themed establishments.
There’s our penchant for food-shaped eateries, of course—see our giant doughnuts or the return of Tail o' the Pup—but dinner with a side of story is a Los Angeles-area staple that predates any corporate chains such as Rainforest Cafe or Chuck E. Cheese. Imagine, for instance, a night out in the Roaring ‘20s. Forget Gatsby-inspired elegance. How about being led by staff in prison garb to a table inside what’s designed to be a makeshift lockup? Such was the conceit of Sunset Boulevard’s Jail Cafe. In downtown L.A., one could order a steak in a restaurant outfitted with cow stalls at Ye Bull Pen Inn, and from the midcentury to today our region has long had a love affair with tropical, Polynesian-inspired culture.
Then the 1980s and ‘90s gave birth to a themed restaurant renaissance, when even Steven Spielberg got into the action with the submarine-focused DIVE! in Century City.
“It’s a really nuanced subject,” says designer Phil Hettema of the themed restaurant conversation. Hettema runs a namesake themed-entertainment firm in Pasadena and contributed to the creation of DIVE!. “I think a themed restaurant is where the experience is of equal or greater value to the dining experience. That’s a tricky balance. DIVE! was one of my favorite experiences to work on, and the owners gave us carte blanche to do whatever we wanted to do.”
Toothsome is an import—a version is open at Universal’s version of CityWalk in Orlando—but it’s just weird enough to feel a part of SoCal’s themed-restaurant lineage with an elaborate, borderline melancholic backstory.
