Surprise! NYCs new Planet Hollywood restaurant has shockingly good food

It’s a shocking twist: The new Planet Hollywood has really good food.The celeb-magnet eatery opened its third NYC iteration two months ago at 136 W.

42nd St., on a corporate block that’s nothing like Times Square around the corner.After friends reported having tacky, processed-tasting snacks at an opening party, I was ready to laugh my head off over menu oddities like “L.A.Lasagna,” an “icon” from the original Planet that opened on West 57th Street in prehistoric 1991.Instead, I felt almost embarrassed to enjoy  it — and  other dishes vastly better than the ones from Planet’s early years, when it was a culinary joke, notwithstanding the backing of Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Demi Moore.The second Planet at 1540 Broadway closed in 2020. When I first reported in 2022  that founder Robert Earl planned another re-launch, he told me it would be “more complex and more appealing to New York locals as well as tourists.”We’ll see about that.

They might be surprised to find that the three-level, 17,500 square-foot venue which cost almost $20 million to build, is almost entirely without the film posters, costumes and other memorabilia that were the main draw at he original Planet Hollywood and version 2.0. The colorful, second-floor dining room and third-floor event space have lots of booths, five-pointed stars attached to the ceiling and lampshade-like overhead lights. Video images of Dua Lipa and Daniel Craig’s James Bond randomly alternate with outer-space cartoons and (for no clear reason) pumping oil derricks on screens all around the rooms.The place has drawn bevies of boldfaces, including Alec Baldwin, 50 Cent and Whoopi Goldberg on opening night and cast parties for Broadway’s “Moulin Rouge” and “& Juliet.” But celebs will eat anything when it’s free, and the last thing I expected was better-than-decent food.It might not rank with nearby Michelin-starred Gabriel Kreuther and fancy steakhouse STK, of...