And clean? Let me tell you, the plates and tables are so clean that you can almost eat off of them. Now, there is a small cleanliness issue with the restrooms, as I’m fairly certain that my wife caught Ebola when she took a whiz in there. Her advice is that if you must eat in Planet Hollywood, just piss your pants. It’s ultimately more hygienic for everyone involved.
The music is loud. Well, not so much loud as it is deafening. My daughter was shouting at me from across the table and I couldn’t make out a word she said. Turns out she was saying “I want to leave!” I just smiled like a moron and nodded, which is why she hates me now.
The food? Forget about it. Literally. Far from having exotic, movie-inspired names, it’s standard Applebee’s-type fare with unimaginative names poorly prepared and served with all the originality of your average Fall TV lineup. As an added bonus, everything is soaked in (and thus tastes like) grease, just to help lubricate the diarrhea that will be shooting through your intestines in a few hours. As an example, ‘Pizza’ is code for ‘tomato sauce on a slice of bread.’
But everybody knows you don’t go to Planet Hollywood for the food, the service, the atmosphere, or for any other reason. You go to see actual props used in Hollywood films. Like the shirt worn by Tom Cruise’s dad in Risky Business or the head of the monster from Hellraiser Part 4: Hellraising Direct to Video. Yes, unforgettable pieces of inspiring classics.
Well, in this Planet Hollywood there was something which perfectly captured the spirit of the true Planet Hollywood dining experience. I took a picture, because I couldn’t imagine my good fortune:
Yes, that’s right: it’s Barbarella’s publicity rifle. Only, it wasn’t there. It’d been taken down (as you can see by the frayed wires in the picture). So it was just a picture of Barbarella. And not even one of the good ones, like this one:
(I never miss a chance to stick in a Barbarella picture)One final Planet Hollywood memory: my son’s defense against the whole thing was to refuse to eat anything and simply fall asleep on his bread pizza, hoping that one of us would take pity on him, wipe the corrosive tomato sauce off before it scarred him for life, and carry him out of the restaurant and home.
I’ll be darned if it didn’t work, and thus give me a new appreciation for his genius.
