Tropical Menagerie in the Desert

The city once dubbed “the Green Felt Jungle” finally has a jungle. A few steps from the craps and blackjack tables at the MGM Grand hotel in Las Vegas, tourists are crowding the Rainforest Cafe, where the ambience is dense with vine-draped movie-set trees, banks of machine-made fog and rain showers piped down from the ceiling.

Manager Phil Froehlich presides over the Rainforest chain’s largest eatery in the West--which is half again as large as the one at South Coast Plaza--600 employees and an animatronic menagerie: elephants, leopards, gorillas and other simians that chatter and trumpet while you relax over a Spotted Chocolate Monkey (mashed bananas, chocolate syrup, vanilla yogurt and rum). Gail Ackerman presides over the real menagerie--hundreds of tropical fish and nine performing parrots. Her morning eye-opener for the birds is a romp in her office shower to condition those desert-parched feathers.

“They love the water,” she said. “They fan out their wings and jump in the air.”

Thunder and lightning every 22 minutes herald a fresh downpour and an uproar from the squawking mechanical animals. It all brings to mind the genuine natural wonders 20 miles away at Nevada’s Spring Mountain Ranch park, where thunderstorms at times drive large, hairy wolf spiders from their burrows in dense swarms that resemble moving blankets scuttling across the desert floor. For most Rainforest diners, a little wildlife goes a long way.