REERUMERBIRIUMMIM
WHILE we understand that the Spectator's is a church so broad as to make the general synod seem positively sect-like by compari- son, there are some activities which we guess to be beyond the interest of even the most catholic reader. A club made up of Spectator-reading acid house partiers or motorcycle sidecar racers or home brewers would, I imagine, be a small club indeed. And it was on this basis that I thought long and hard before braving a table at Planet Hollywood on your behalf. But — 0 tem- poral 0 mores! — it turns out that the Tro- cadero, that purple and chrome excrescence on Shaftesbury Avenue where a perfectly elegant building used to be, has become something of an up-market Brent Cross, and just as the teenagers of Hendon and Edgware hang out at the former, so have the sons and daughters of Mayfair and Belgravia — you get a better class of lout these days — adopted the Troc as a sort of youth-club-cum-coffee-bar.
I am presuming that you are already acquainted with what its owners, investors and publicists like to call 'the concept', since even the broadsheets deemed the opening of a new hamburger joint in Pic- cadilly to warrant press coverage. And if you do not know that Planet Hollywood is part-owned by Bruce Willis, Sylvester Stal- lone and Arnold Schwarzenegger you are lucky indeed, and luckier still if you don't know who Willis, Stallone and Schwarze- negger are, or that hereabouts we know them as Bruce, Sly and Arnie.
So let me pass over all of that and sit down to eat. Not that Planet Hollywood is about food; it is, rather, about the Ameri- can-born, globally shared, fascination with celebrity. This goes beyond star-gazing fans. It is a characteristic of famous people everywhere to feel nervous around those untouched themselves by fame. In New York, film stars open restaurants, you could almost think, just so other film stars have somewhere safe to go at night. Planet Hollywood, at least in its cisatlantic incar- nation, is not quite the same story. Not least because Bruce, Sly and Arnie are merely playing the parts of restaurant own- ers. They are investors in the business, but it is Mr Robert Earl's baby. And if people really are prepared to queue outside for hours (as so far they seem prepared to do) in the hope of catching sight of someone famous, then they really are gullible saps. The real point of Planet Hollywood is merchandising. Jackets, T-shirts, baseball caps, the usual, are piled up for sale and punters are piling up to buy them. This at least has a nice appropriateness for a eine- ma-themed restaurant; Hollywood films — Batman, Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles, Dick Tracey and so on — have become some- thing of a merchandising exercise them- selves. But not everything is for sale. Exhibited 'free of charge' are, among the garland of movieland memorabilia, the ice- pick from Basic Instinct, the handcuffs from 91'2 Weeks, the axe from The Shining and, on a more salubrious note, the dirndlish gar- ment in which Julie Andrews sang Have Confidence in Me' in The Sound of Music.
The pandemonium that greets you employees in psychedelic shirts shouting at each other by walkie-talkie — is a fair indi- cation of what is to follow. The place is crashingly noisy, and thus ideal for cover- ing up the embarrassed silences of divorced fathers having their fortnightly Saturday lunch with their offspring. Now, I have no doubt that children will love it here (but then, like old people, children have such bad taste), but if you want to give your dar- lings a treat, be prepared for sacrifice. The food is vile. I love American food as eaten in America, but if you served a Lon- don Planet Hollywood burger in the US of A, you would probably find you were in contravention of the Constitution. Desic- cated and bready and nuked within an inch of its life, it is a shoddy piece of work. Ribs were like cardboard. Fajitas TV-dinnerish. Texas nachos rather enjoyable in a junky kind of a way. Caramel Crunch pie ditto. Drinks made one shiver. How about 'The Terminator', which is 'a cyborg's mixture of vodka, rum, gin, Grand Marnier, Tia Maria, Kahlua, sweet and sour, splashed with cranberry, then topped with draught beer? This one will leave you saying, "I'll be back".' I'll say — can you imagine a more instant emetic?
The fact the food's bad won't, I imagine, deter many people, but I feel the prices might. Dinner, admittedly a self-sacrificing and dutifully sampling three-courser, for three of us came to £73 without tip.
Planet Hollywood, Unit 75 Trocadero Centre, Coventry Street, WI. Tel (no hooking): 071 287 1000.
Nigella Lawson
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