Celebrity chef freshens menu with variety, donkey sauce
Chef, restaurateur and TV personality Guy Fieri has developed a special menu to be served at the refurbished Planet Hollywood that’s part of the Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Fla.
The overall menu at the 845-seat restaurant, dubbed Planet Hollywood Observatory, which reopened last week after a yearlong closure, is similar to those at other Planet Hollywood locations in London, New York, Las Vegas, Paris and London, but the sandwich-and-burger section has been developed by Fieri and his team.
Special sandwiches include the Pimento Grilled Cheese, which comes triple stacked with six-cheese mac & cheese, Fieri’s signature SMC, or “super melty cheese,” and pimento cheese on garlic-buttered sourdough. Also on the sandwich menu is a Championship Pulled Pork, made with pork in bourbon-brown sugar barbecue sauce with coleslaw, pickles, fried onion straws and “donkey sauce” (mayonnaise, Worcestershire sauce, roasted garlic, mustard-salt and pepper) on garlic-buttered brioche. The menu also has a Cajun-spiced grilled-chicken sandwich; a fried-chicken sandwich with ranch dressing, pickles, cheddar, coleslaw and honey hot sauce; a chicken BLT; and a turkey sandwich with cranberry relish, Swiss cheese, barbecue kettle chips, lettuce, tomato, onion, pickle and donkey sauce.
Bird Is The Word Pho sandwich
Burgers include The Mayor of Flavortown topped with pastrami on a pretzel bun; a Tatted Up Turkey, which is topped with roasted poblano peppers, smoked gouda, Swiss cheese, caramelized onion jam, lettuce, tomato, onion and pickle on a garlic-buttered pretzel bun; and Morgan’s Veggie, which is a scratch-made vegetable burger of black beans, white beans, chickpeas, oats, artichokes, roasted red peppers and garlic with cilantro aïoli, lettuce, tomatoes, onions and pickles on a toasted wheat bun.Planet Hollywood founder and CEO Robert Earl said he teamed up with Fieri because the space, built in a dome and intended to resemble an observatory, requires a larger-than-life personality. What is more, celebrity chefs attract customers.
“Because of the frequency that they’re on TV, the demand to actually frequent something that they’re involved in is very, very high,” said Earl, who had worked with celebrity-chef Gordon Ramsay at the Planet Hollywood Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, where Ramsay has a burger concept.
He added that some celebrity chefs are more approachable than others, and “Guy fits in with the profile of our guests,” he said. “They feel so comfortable with him that they’d like to hang out with him, that they’d have something to say to him, and they’re just very comfortable being associated with him.”
Earl also said he enjoyed the new menu items.
“It’s really tasty and gooey and healthy. I was joking about the last bit,” he said.
The exterior of the new Planet Hollywood.
Fieri also has experience working for larger companies: He has restaurants on Carnival Cruise Lines ships among more than 50 other locations throughout the United States.
Fieri said at Planet Hollywood he wanted to offer a variety of different styles, “knowing we’re going to get a melting pot of people coming in,” he said.
“This is a worldwide destination, and with that in mind I wanted to make 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.”
Contact Bret Thorn at [email protected]
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