Guy Fieri recently teamed up with Planet Hollywood to add his touch to the celebrity-themed restaurant’s menu at its refurbished Walt Disney World Resort location in Orlando, Fla.
Fieri and his team developed the Planet Hollywood Observatory’s sandwiches and burgers. The lineup includes an American Kobe burger, vegetarian and turkey burgers, and The Mayor of Flavortown, a burger topped with grilled pastrami. Special items include a pimento grilled cheese sandwich and a pulled pork sandwich with “donkey sauce,” Fieri’s blend of mayonnaise, Worcestershire sauce, roasted garlic, mustard, salt and pepper.
Fieri, who also has restaurants on Carnival Cruise Lines ships, discussed partnership strategies.
How did this partnership develop?
[Planet Hollywood CEO] Robert Earl contacted me about a year and a half ago and said, “We’re rebuilding Planet Hollywood. We’re gonna make it monster; it’s gonna be awesome; and we’d like to have you build a specifically burger menu to feature in the restaurant.”
We brought down a variety of different [burger and sandwich] styles … knowing we’re going to get a melting pot of people coming in. This is a worldwide destination, and with that in mind, we made sure we had a creative offering of burgers on the menu that were going to give people a chance to try something they maybe hadn’t tried before.
How did you ensure Planet Hollywood would make the menu items to your specifications?
We try to eliminate as many opportunities to fail as we can. If you think about cooking a burger, one of the principles we have is we cook our burgers hot and fast. As soon as you let that burger sit there and cook itself out, as we say, it will cook down, render out the fat, and you will have a dry patty in no time at all. Then we toast the bun on both sides, because we’re texture freaks in this culture. We consider how we cut the lettuce, not having the burger get heavy and weighted down. It’s the sum of all these little pieces of making a great burger that are going to come together.
You have more than 50 locations with your different partners. How do you maintain consistency?
Like any relationship, you’ve got to have trust. You’ve got to believe, and you really have to see eye to eye about what quality and consistency is.
So we do our follow-ups, we do our spot checks, we read our emails, we pay attention to what’s going on, and we go and visit these locations. But I’ve got to be honest, we’ve been on Carnival Cruise Lines for years, and we can’t make it on all the ships all the time with all the voyages they have. We don’t have cameras on them; we don’t have anyone monitoring them on a daily basis. And I’ve owned my own restaurants for years — I just recently sold them. I know what it is to be an owner-operator on the line, in the house, seven days a week. And even when you’re putting that time and attention into it, there’s an opportunity for it to go awry.
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