Rainforest Cafe Niagara Falls Canada — Restaurant in Niagara Falls

Ladies, gentlemens and none of the aboves, please allow me to regale you with the story of the MARS club and the Sunk Cost Fallacy.

We decided to take a trip to Niagara falls as a fun little day for tourist attractions and money spending. Since all four of us were enraptured by the novelty of the Rainforest Cafe, we decided to go there for dinner.

Six pm comes and we decide it's time to eat. since it was just a random Saturday, we though it would have been fine not having a reservation and even if there was a bit of a wait we could just kill time in the quaint little gift shop. As the defacto leader of the MARS Club in that moment, I had approached the hostess stand

We wait.

There are two employees, standing around and chatting, occasionally writing things down. I am too anxious to speak up, but eventually they see me and ask if I have a reservation. I do not. "Okay, it's about fifteen minutes wait, is that okay?" I respond that it is. They take my name and phone number, and say that they will send me a text when our table is ready. I receive the confirmation text message saying that I've been added to the wait list, and think "great! Now I just need to wait for Navi to scream 'hey! Listen!' as my designated text message notification tone."

We wait.

I circle the gift shop three times, cheering when I see my name written on tacky magnets and mugs and balking when I see the dreaded "Sophia" on products I might actually like. Eventually the entire MARS club finds ourselves staring at the fish tank to observe all of the fancy fish they have on display. We begin to question how long it has been.

It's only been twenty minutes, we figure they might just be behind a little bit but some are starting to question if we should eat somewhere else. The first utterance of "sunk cost" is made. We continue to watch the fish tank.

Soon thirty five minutes pass from the initial walk in time. We wonder if maybe they had forgotten about us. We question again if it would be better to leave, but the sunk cost is mentioned once more. I go up to the hostess stand again and ask if our table might be ready. They ask for my name, and the remaining host begins anxiously leafing through post it notes looking for my name.

He tells me he is sorry, but he's lost the information. He offers us the table of another group that hadn't come forward to claim it yet, so we take the offer if anything just for a place to sit down.

We finally walk into the dining hall and discover it is practically empty. I can see three or so other tables that are currently occupied, which I find somewhat frustrating considering how long they made us wait. The corner we are sat in is dark but we're still able to look through the menus and chat. We notice these prices were much (much) higher than we expected, even knowing that this was a tourist trap restaurant but the sunk cost is invoked once more and we decide to continue.

We figure we'd just get fancy drinks for the souvenir cups, split an appetizer and maybe get a dessert. Even the appetizers are overpriced for what you get, but none of us would ever truly know.

it's been quite a while since we've been seated, but no one has come by to take our drink order. By examining my texts I am able to deduce we sat down fifteen minutes prior.

Once more the MARS Club debates leaving. Once more the sunk cost is reiterated.

And so we wait.

Another ten minutes pass and our decision has been made. We are hungry, discouraged, and haven't even seen a member of staff to flag down since we last took note of the long wait. So we finally decide the cost has been sunk, and leave to go to another restaurant outside of Clifton Hill this time.

Legend says the MARS Club would still be waiting had we decided to stay.

Cons: service slower than tar pitch. Prices that cannot possibly in any reality reflect on the quality of the food. The floors were sticky. Very unpleasant. I wish I could say more but I literally didn't experience anything else.

Pros: Got to see the elusive Eel in the fish tank twice. I...

I never write reviews, but after my recent trip to Niagara Falls and The Rainforest Cafe, I felt the need to sit down and share what kind of experience you should expect. To start - I am most certainly not a restaurant snob. I don't expect to be treated like royalty or to get exquisite food, I do, however, expect to eat in an environment that evokes cleanliness, tasty food, and a good dining experience. None of these things were what I had experienced when I went on Wednesday 7/16/2025.

I had expected to be transported into a high quality jungle experience, as I have when I visited other locations like one in Florida. What I was transported to, felt like a 1996 food court in Action Park. The animatronics are incredibly old, and most of the time you can hear the humming of their archaic mechanisms, loud plastic clicking noises when their eyes blinked, tails moved, etc...It did not feel like a classy or unique dining experience, but a cheap thrill ride from days past.

To begin, my friend and I arrived at about 2pm, and it was not very busy at all. We said that there would be two of us eating, and the hostess greeted us and did not say a word before the manager came over and they conversed. No "Hang on one second we'll get your table ready" or any sort of acknowledgement. We stood around aimlessly looking for what animatronic was making that loud click bang sound only to look up and see an ancient robot jaguar barely able to function.

The table was okay, but the overall atmosphere felt unclean, dusty, and neglected. Half of the plants in the planter beds next to us (We sat by the gorillas) were ripped out by prior patrons and left laying around in the planters. Additionally, the rainforest sounds and animal sounds are played alongside a pop music track which in combination with the jungle sounds and people talking just sounds chaotic.

It was at this time that I decided to go to the restroom to wash my hands before eating, as we had walked around most of the day earlier. This was the worst decision I have made on a trip. The men's bathroom was nothing short of atrocious. Surfaces, corners, creases all covered in sludge/slimy residue, toilet paper all over the ground, and the hand dryers were absolutely foul. Wherever plastic met plastic in a seam or crease, there was some sort of crust and grime. Each sink had a lovely ring of pink/grey/beige sludge around where the undermount had slid, and I felt even dirtier walking out than I walked in.

Then the food arrived. We each had ordered a cheeseburger (I believe they call it their rainforest burger or something), and each of us a mixed drink. The drinks were good, but I knew right away that we had made a mistake when the food came out. What we were served was a cooked-from-frozen hamburger patty, definitely not made in house. It was grey and didn't even look like they had tried to form it or cook or even season it themselves. It literally looked like they got the absolute cheapest kinds of pre formed burgers, cooked them, slapped a piece of cheese on it and put it on a bun. The fries were inferior to Applebees or Ruby Tuesday. Also frozen and reheated. Nothing was seasoned, there was no special touch or sauce, etc...nothing that made it better than going to Dollar General and buying their cheapest version of Bubba burger, reheating it, and calling it a $95 meal. To say that I was disappointed would be an understatement. We each ate not even half of our burgers before deciding that we couldn't stomach any more.

The server and who I believe was the manager were very very nice, and they were not the problem here at all. It is the quality that you get when you expect to go somewhere that has a reputation for having pretty good food and atmosphere. I am horrified that I spent almost $100 here when I could have gotten a better meal at a Denny's or Applegreen for 1/6 the price.

Unfortunately I don't have images of the experience, but I would highly recommend that you take your business elsewhere until these things...

We attempted to dine at this restaurant tonight with our 3 young children. We arrived at 7:45 and were told it would be a 25 minute wait for a table, we felt this was reasonable so we waited but we weren’t seated until after 9pm (red flag #1). Upon walking to our table, I noticed the restaurant appeared very dirty with food and debris all over the ground (red flag #2). The restaurant was fairly empty with plenty of tables but we were seated at the table right at the entrance to the kitchen with a giant dirty fan blowing that was incredibly loud. We asked for a different table but the host seemed hesitant to seat us somewhere else which I didn’t understand. Our server approached us and offered us a booth instead, away from the giant noisy, dirty fan and we were fine with that. Our server was kind and attentive. He promptly brought us water, however they didn’t have enough clean cups so I was served water in a disposable cup… (red flag #3). At a restaurant that charges at least $34 for an entree, I didn’t expect to be served anything in plastic. We ordered meals for our children and I took my daughter to the bathroom while we waited. The garbage cans in the bathroom were overflowing, 2 out of 6 stalls were out of order and the accessible stall was absolutely disgusting - I couldn’t imagine being a person with a disability and having no choice but to use that filthy stall (red flag #4). Upon returning to our table, I sat down and my shirt caught on something underneath the table and ripped. The plastic covering on the table wasn’t properly affixed and caught my shirt and tore it. It was quite sharp and I worried about my kids getting hurt by it (red flag #5). By this point, we had serious concerns about the cleanliness of the restaurant and our kids were exhausted from waiting over an hour but they were very hungry so we requested our kids’ meals to go (chicken nuggets & fries, and pepperoni pizza & fries), we opted not to order meals for ourselves. Our server was apologetic and we acknowledged that absolutely none of this was his fault. He was prompt in bringing us the kids meals and our bill. We inspected the meals before leaving the restaurant and noticed the pizza was very undercooked and not edible (the dough was practically raw - red flag #6). At this point we approached the manager. She was kind and apologized for our negative experience. We were refunded the cost of our meals, and our children were given souvenir cups. We appreciated these gestures but were sad to leave with such a disappointing experience. Too many red flags for me to recommend this place or give it a second chance. There’s better spots to eat on...