In Defence of Bubba Gump
(The restaurant, not the man…although he’s all good with me too.)
I’m sitting on a sturdy red diner chair, the type with a cushion that exhales when you sit down on it, holding a piece of garlic bread in one hand. In the other, a sugary cocktail in a novelty metal bucket that I don’t trust not to start leaking before the meal is out. On a huge screen on one wall is a close-up on a man’s bloody stump, his screaming playing over the TV’s speaker. I am, inexplicably, having a great time.
There are certain places that you set out to go. That you have to plan months in advance (just to get a table at 9pm), wear a tie to get in, and talk about only in hushed reverent tones lest they change their minds about letting you walk through the door.
Bubba Gump Shrimp Company is not one of these places.
Like Hard Rock Cafe and Planet Hollywood (good luck finding one of the three that still exist), Bubba Gump is somewhere that you end up. Somewhere that you find yourself inside and wonder, sometimes aloud, “how did we end up here?”
The menu, once a legitimately unhinged read, has been tamed; Lt. Dan’s Drunken Shrimp and Bucket of Boat Trash have been stricken from its pages. But it remains a little unhinged, thanks to dishes like Jenny’s Salmon and Shrimp. Nothing perks up the appetite like the memory of a woman who suffered an agonising on-screen death from HIV. (Yes, virtually everybody named on this menu is, canonically, dead.)
A restaurant dedicated to a film released in 2001 still existing, let alone thriving, today makes no sense. It’s the equivalent of a Pulp Fiction burger joint (ok, bad example, since we’re still seeing Big Kahuna popups appear every now and again), a scoop of Vanilla Sky ice cream or a bottle of wine from the Gilbert Grape Vineyard.
This place should not exist. But, somehow, it does. As the crowds get younger, they may come to think of Forrest Gump as a movie about that restaurant they went to, rather than the other way around. For the rest of us, it’s a relic untouched by time.
You can’t go back to Blockbuster Video or Toys R Us, or wait impatiently for the screech of your dial-up connection to give way to the sound of “You’ve Got Mail”, but you can still take in this place’s maximalist design and the pictures on the menu while a server quizzes you on a movie that you haven’t watched in full since the early 2000s.
And the food is good! Or, perhaps, better than you think it will be.
The Shrimp New Orleans, a creamy Cajun concoction, is a personal favourite of mine and the mere smell of it transports me somewhere. Not New Orleans, since I’ve never actually visited The Big Easy, but…somewhere. So what if that somewhere is just the first Bubba Gump I visited on a family vacation some twenty plus years ago?
On the Doughboys podcast, not surprisingly a regular listen of mine, Paul Scheer said that he “absolutely despised the Shrimp New Orleans. It tastes like dirt shrimp…It didn't work for me in any way. I neglected going back there every time.” I guess it’s fair to say that, at Bubba Gump, your mileage may vary when it comes to food quality.
And if you want to hate Bubba Gump Shrimp Company, then you’ll hate it. “The decor is tacky” (yes). “It’s expensive” (sure). “The food is all microwaved” (maybe). “The Run Forrest Run / Stop Forrest Stop mechanic is lame” (slander towards the license plate system will not be tolerated in this house). I get it. It’s easy to hate stuff.
But it’s even easier to like it. Something I’m learning more and more as I get older.
In an age where most restaurants are streamlining their menus and blandifying their interiors to make them more palatable (and, yes, make it easier to sell the building when they fail), Bubba Gump is unapologetically itself. It doesn’t wink at you or nudge you with nostalgia. It reminds you of the ‘90s because it is what it was in the ‘90s.
That’s why I’ll keep going back for as long as it’s around, even if that’s kind of a big ask these days. I’m based in the UK, and the only Bubba Gump and Rainforest Cafe on this side of the pond both closed a few years ago only to be replaced briefly by off brand clones called Shrimp & Grill and Jungle Cave. (Holy Temu knockoffs, Batman!)
Both locations have since closed permanently.
Wendy’s doesn’t have sunrooms anymore. Hooters might be going bankrupt. The $5 footlong is a distant memory. The world spins fast enough, just let me have this one place where I can kick back with the music my dad listens to, watch that movie playing endlessly on a cursed loop, and stop (Forrest, stop) the world for a long lunch.
Long live Bubba Gump.