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If you’ve grown up in this state, you know exactly what I’m talking about. But it’s likely that your reaction is different, based on whether you first attended this venue as a child or a parent. Much like St. Louis’s favorite pizza, if you haven’t tried it by age 9, you won’t be impressed. But if you have…oh, the joys of this spot on east Colfax! I have many memories of exploring every nook with my brother, usually arriving after pleading with innocent family visitors to take us there (you know, those visitors who at the end of the trip say, “you’ve shown us such a lovely time, we’d like to take you out to dinner. Where would the children like to go?”). Everything about this place is magical: from the shrieking journey through Black Bart’s Cave, to the hilarious hourly shows featuring the gorilla, his idiot keeper, and the reporter who ALWAYS loses her wig and is pushed into the pool two stories below by the gorilla, to the mining area with sleeping miners, to the crazy helium balloon machine, to the mariachis, to the fire juggling divers to the hourly pinatas to the endless other places to run around while our parents sat at the table and embarrassedly apologized to whichever family visitor we had talked into treating us here, sight unseen.

This all being said, I know lots of people who grew up with this fantastical place and yet feel like it doesn’t hold up to a visit as an adult. I worried about this (as well as memories of the food – terrible – but acceptable to a non-discerning distracted child’s palate). But now we had visitors arriving, complete with a 9-year-old, and no way were we going to disappoint by denying him a visit. And I don’t think it disappointed him, either, since upon repeated questioning, he proudly stated it was the best part of his trip. And it definitely did hold up to an adult visit, mainly because it was almost. the. exact. same.

Seriously, my last visit was easily 16 years ago, and it still had the same look, smell, same sense of the impossible (how does that strip mall location fit seating for over 1,000 and a two-story waterfall all inside??), same cheesy skits, and same scary bits of Black Bart’s Cave. Oh, and same awful food. That being said, any visit by an adult should come requisite with the less-than-normal process of eating a meal an hour or so BEFORE going. Once there, you are required to buy a meal, but simply don’t eat it. Box it up for the pets or something, and only ingest the drinks and sopapillas. You’ll be much happier that way, and you are certain to find cheap, quality Mexican food in the surrounding neighborhood, so this is simpler than it sounds.

It’s amazing that a business that forces its waitstaff to respond with a quick trot to any table that has raised a tiny red flag has remained in business for over 30 years (Sam demonstrates in this picture), but I suppose unlimited trays of sopapillas keep all involved happy. Strangely enough, those of us with strong memories noticed only two changes: the genie in the magic wishing well is far less scary (no, it’s not just that I’m grown up, they really did change it); and the waitstaff has dramatically shifted demographics. As a kid, I remember the staff being full adults, clearly frustrated and rushed, with dark stains under each arm. This time around, all the waitstaff we spoke with were young, hip teens – eager to put a more interesting job on their college applications. This strange shift meant that all of them seemed quite happy, like a self-selecting group of pleasant ironists. This made the biggest significant change easier to deal with: for the first time ever, I had to pay my own way.

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