Planet Hollywood has better food than it has any right to. Let’s face it -- this colossal monument to the movies is a tourist heaven seemingly dedicated to fun, not food. Out-of-towners and locals enter this Times Square landmark through a retail store selling Planet Hollywood T-shirts, jackets, and souvenir glasses.
Music envelopes the thousands of people who each week pass through to the elevators that whisk them to a 35,000-square-foot, two-tier “Hooray for Hollywood” milieu of motion picture memorabilia, a Broadway room, and an area devoted to sports keepsakes. Mobiles of model planes rotate above, two cars hang hood-first from the ceiling, TV screens flash music videos to often-awed diners surrounded by the paraphernalia of movie stars. Their clothing (Olivia Newton-John’s dress from Grease was behind us), pictures, and movie music pervades the premises. Planet Hollywood itself is much like a big Technicolor musical. The space ship from Independence Day dangles above along with a parachute while the TV screens switch to Marlon Brando in a scene from On the Waterfront or Gene Kelly doing his Singing in the Rain dance sequence. All of this fuses into a visual and audio extravaganza that can easily cause patrons to forget that this is, after all, a restaurant -- and a rather good one.
Food is not an afterthought here. A kitchen crew of about 60 churns out the dishes offered on a voluminous menu dominated by huge portions of American comfort food with a sprinkling of Mexican, Italian and Asian favorites. Among the appetizers, Texas tostados, calamari and bruschetta vie for attention with sliders, potato skins and Buffalo wings, while entrées like sizzling shrimp fajitas and teriyaki salmon combine with barbecue pork ribs, steaks and crab cakes to form a diverse array of main courses. Add an ample contingent of pizzas, pastas, burgers, sandwiches, salads and sides and few diners will fail to find a favorite to their liking.
We had no problems. Blackened shrimp with a tangy Creole mustard sauce, narrow strands of toasted garlic bread accompanied by tomato aioli and diced tomato cubes in basil oil that formed a do-it-yourself bruschetta, a stack of crisp Texas tostados crowned by barbecued chicken, sautéed onions, two cheeses, sour cream and pico de gallo and three moist, juicy Angus sirloin sliders enhanced with cheddar cheese, Russian dressing and a pickle slice left us smiling and full.
Nevertheless, we gave our all to a gargantuan slab of tender, fall-from-the-bone barbecued pork ribs, a couple of respectable crab cakes, so called blackened Mahi Mahi that weren’t black but were good and a chicken, avocado and Swiss sandwich.
1540 Broadway at 45th St., 212-333-7827; www.planethollywood.com
Richard Jay Scholem was a restaurant critic for the New York Times Long Island Section for 14 years. His A La Carte Column appeared from 1990 to 2004. For more “Taste of the Town” reviews, click here.
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