Whipped Cream Difficulties

This popped up on Hacker News, and, while I have reservations about linking to Esquire for anything but drinks, it did entertain me: “The Rise and Fall of Planet Hollywood“.

I never went to a Planet Hollywood: when it first opened, it struck me as a cynical cash grab, and nothing in this article convinces me otherwise.

Some relevant quotes:

The ax Jack Nicholson wielded in The Shining, still caked in fake blood, was buried in the back of the garden shed of a guy who worked on the film.
“We asked what he wanted for it,” Todd told the Los Angeles Times in 1995, “and he said, ‘Well, I’ll need another ax.’ That was an easy deal.”

…

In interviews at the time, it was promised that Schwarzenegger would be in the kitchen cooking Wiener schnitzel. But when the three chiseled men did press for the restaurant, it seemed clear how much the menu was an afterthought. “The day they can reduce a meal to a pill, I’ll be happy,” Stallone said with a smirk in a 1992 interview with British talk-show host Michael Aspel. “I guess it’s from doing a great deal of training or whatever. Maybe it’s just genetic; I’m just not prone to chew a lot. It doesn’t go with my personality.”

…

“I don’t remember it ever having a lot of class,” says Hay. “I just remember the food got worse and worse and worse and worse until it really became inedible. And if you were going to go there for an event, you ate before, because you knew you couldn’t eat anything.”

…

“It was incredibly monotonous for us, because there was a hierarchy like there is at any other job,” says actress Natalie Zea, who worked as a hostess at the Manhattan Planet Hollywood in 1994. “The servers were superior to us, because they’re the ones who got to interact on the occasion when somebody [famous] would come in. There was no real behind-the-scenes. It was just so rote.”

…

“My only real memory of [stars coming in] is this blurry vision of a very tall man being kind of swept through as I stand behind the podium thinking, Oh, he’ll see me and be like, ‘You, hostess, there. Let me put you in a movie,’ ” Zea says. “Which, to be honest, is the only reason any of us worked there.”

(For those who don’t recognize Natalie Zea’s name, she did get discovered eventually. She was “Raylan Givens” ex-wife/current girlfriend on “Justified”, and was “Wade Felton”‘s (Walton Goggins) girlfriend on “The Unicorn” before that got cancelled.)

Copycat restaurants were popping up all around. There was Country Star with Reba McEntire, Clint Black, Vince Gill, and Wynonna Judd. Fashion Cafe, with models Naomi Campbell, Elle Macpherson, and Claudia Schiffer, opened in Rockefeller Center just down the street from the Manhattan Planet Hollywood. Steven Spielberg had Dive!, an underwater-themed restaurant with, yes, gourmet submarine sandwiches. Hulk Hogan had Pastamania! Earl launched his own spin-offs to help with growth when Planet Hollywood ran out of places to open Planet Hollywoods. There was a sports offshoot, the Official All Star Cafe, with Shaquille O’Neal, Andre Agassi, and Joe Montana. When Tiger Woods made his first public appearance after winning the Masters in 1997, it was at the opening of Myrtle Beach’s All Star Cafe. There was also an ice cream chain, Cool Planet, with Whoopi Goldberg. Any cool factor associated with Planet Hollywood was melting. The stock value plummeted, and people just weren’t going back to eat. In 1999, Los Angeles magazine reported that same-store sales—a critical factor in a restaurant’s long-term success—fell by 18 percent the previous year. And the food only seemed to be getting worse.

…

A rep for Stallone says, “Contrary to the assertion by Robert Earl, Mr. Stallone is no longer involved with Planet Hollywood.” (Stallone and Willis, who were effusive in their enthusiasm for Planet Hollywood throughout the nineties and during the Vegas opening in 2007, declined to be interviewed for this piece. A rep for Willis never responded to my inquiry about the actor’s current involvement with the brand. A rep for Schwarzenegger didn’t respond to multiple inquiries.)

Bonus: I was sort of on the fence about using this. But in the end, it told me something I didn’t know, and the presenter isn’t quite as grating as some of those other “abandoned thing” guys.

Did you know there was a Hard Rock theme park? It opened in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina in April of 2008. The plan was for it to be the first of a chain of Hard Rock theme parks.

It closed in September of 2008. The parent company filed for Chapter 11, and the park was sold off. It reopened in May of 2009 as “Freestyle Music Park“, with the Hard Rock branding removed. Freestyle’s parent company was sued multiple times by various entities for various reasons, and the park closed again at the end of the 2009 season. It never reopened and remains abandoned today.

(I’ve been to Myrtle Beach once or twice, but it was when we lived in Virginia, so about 50 years ago, long before Hard Rock Park. My most vivid memory of those trips was us going to some other amusement park, and being upset that I was too short for the bumper cars. I do know people in the North Carolina area, but I’m not sure if any of them ever made the trip down to Hard Rock Park.)