Nostalgia is the only reason why there's a new Planet Hollywood in Times Square. But my nostalgia is different from everybody else's. While the caretakers of this functionally dead brand are trying to lure diners by advertising "1991 Vibes," my relationship with this restaurant only dates to a few chaotic months of 2019 that changed my life. Six years later, given the opportunity to eat at the only true Planet Hollywood in the U.S. outside of Disney World, I went back wondering if I might find a little catharsis.
The old Times Square Planet Hollywood closed in 2020, and the new one opened up earlier this year. The advertisements for it called to me from the Playbills I would read on Broadway: Lauren, you have to go back. And on Saturday, in trying to figure out a place to eat before seeing Mamma Mia!, Planet Hollywood was logistically and thematically appropriate—a pairing of kitschy enterprises that offer their customers a chance to stop time. Or at least, that's what you'd think a Planet Hollywood should do.
Walking into the refreshed NYC PH, passing first a red-carpet photo background and then the merch for sale, the scenery scanned as expected. But after ascending to the dining room on the second floor, nothing felt the same. The walls weren't cluttered with old movie souvenirs—only a few were squirreled away on a wall by the bathrooms. Instead, the place was covered nearly in full by ultra high-def screens. These screens weren't even playing classic film snippets. On some level, they were embracing the Hard Rock concept of music videos while you eat, but it was stranger than that: Sometimes, instead of a real video, they put up a "Sphere showing Wizard of Oz" style backdrop to go with the music. Here's a non-comprehensive list of things that passed across the screens while we dined: Dua Lipa's Barbie video; music videos for James Bond themes; a sci-fi spaceship screensaver for Daft Punk's Tron music; a country Western background for Shaboozey; pristine farmland footage for "Beautiful Day" by U2; a compilation video of movie characters dancing set to the "I can make your hands clap" song, which seemed to have a YouTuber's watermark in the corner the whole time; and live feeds of no less than three birthday celebrations throughout the restaurant.
It was weird, and while it's hard for me to say that anything about it was truly bad, it was definitely the opposite of "1991 vibes" to me. It felt like whoever crafted this experience was at least mildly embarrassed by the creaky, cluttered camp of the old Planet Hollywood and wanted to update it with something sleeker, less distinctive, and more futuristically uncanny. But if you're doing that, why call it Planet Hollywood at all? Shamelessness is at least 80 percent of the reason why anyone wants to go. If you take away the animals from Rainforest Cafe, for example, all you're left with is Cafe. I want my Planet Hollywood to stay frozen in all its stupid, theme-restaurant-boom glory. No one's going there looking for innovation. Without the dusty and overstuffed decor, it was lacking any charm that might make me want to bring back my co-workers for old time's sake, to reminisce about the day our professional lives transformed forever.
The first real job of my life was an extremely lucky one: the sports blog Deadspin, which I had idolized since I was too young to be reading it. When I showed up, initially as an intern, the offices were in Union Square, some 30 blocks below Times Square, and their after-work bar was a now-defunct New York Islanders haunt called Offside Tavern (itself a rebrand of the unfortunately named Bunga's Den). They gave you free tater tots with every pitcher of beer, and crucially, they usually had plenty of space for a large group of bloggers looking to hang on a weeknight. We could never go anywhere "cool," I told outsiders, because having that space to chat was always our No. 1 priority.
In 2019, the group of websites that included Deadspin was bought by private equity, which did what private equity does. Everything about the product got worse, the company was crumbling, and we were all bracing for impact. But one of the least-bad moves made by the genius businessmen behind the collapse was giving us swanky new Times Square real estate less than a year before lockdowns completely disappeared in-office work. So we needed a new bar. Planet Hollywood was ... well, it was right there, sharing a building with an also-doomed Buca di Beppo. PH was never crowded. It boasted a happy hour that, I kid you not, lasted eight hours and started before noon. And the restaurant did, in fact, have a goofy, exuberant charm to it—its speakers blaring songs like the Ghostbusters theme, its walls packed with memorabilia from movies like the second Austin Powers sequel, its appetizers arriving in Ferris-wheel form. Everything from the music to the movie clips on the old TVs seemed to loop after only about 90 minutes, but that only made it feel more familiar.
The day one of our own was unceremoniously fired for refusing the edict to "stick to sports," we all left the building with him and bunkered down in Planet Hollywood, wondering what to do next. The following day, after I and so many others who would go on to start this website had quit our jobs, there was nowhere else we could think to go. I told the bartender what we had done, because that seemed like a thing you'd tell a bartender, then settled into happy hour and got so absorbed in the atmosphere that I forgot to confirm my resignation to the New York Times reporter working on the story about it. You could accurately say that the seeds of Defector—which I now consider to be my life's work—were planted in Planet Hollywood.
The new Planet Hollywood? Happy hours are now a mere three hours long. I guess you can't relive the past.
That's not to say the trip was a wash. I avoided the appetizer Ferris wheel, because it cost $48, but by the standards of Times Square, I was satisfied with my meal. I drank a cosmo, because I've been watching too much Sex and the City lately, and I ordered the "world famous chicken crunch," because I'm a sucker for anything labelled "world famous." The fries I got as a side were very thinly sliced but mostly crisp and flavorful. The chicken seemed to have a honey-like sweetness between the breading and the meat, but it was filling and paired well with hot sauce. Also, the basket looked like this. Camp isn't dead!
My friend got a "fried lasagna" that seemed all right, even if it was hard to tell what made it lasagna, and my boyfriend, who was fully prepared to hate it, finished his "Mexican fiesta burger." Ultimately, Planet Hollywood cleared the bar that you should set for a huge pre-Broadway establishment: competently produced food that makes you feel a little wacky while you're eating but quickly fades from memory during the stimuli that follows (in this case, the music of ABBA).
What of my own emotional journey? Well, I think back on those hours spent at the Planet Hollywood in late October 2019—yes, it was decked out for Halloween—with a heavy dose of gratitude. At the time, the malicious destruction of Deadspin was devastating to me. It had introduced me to some of my favorite people, provided a large, smart audience for my writing, and served as a pillar of stability in my life when I was a newly out trans girl adjusting to the big city. I literally sobbed in front of Tom Ley in that office high above Times Square when I finally accepted that there was no chance whatsoever that we could save the site—that the only option was to quit. And then I went downstairs to Planet Hollywood, had a few $4 beers, and hung out with people I cared about. In that disorienting time, Planet Hollywood was a place to regroup after a painful life event. All these years later, it was just an OK dinner. And Deadspin is just a place I used to work before helping to start Defector.
