Official All Star Café
A 600-seat sports cathedral in Times Square where six of the world's biggest athletes put their names on a restaurant and filled it with memorabilia, video screens, and booths shaped like baseball mitts. It was Planet Hollywood's sports sequel — and proof that celebrity branding could turn dinner into an arena experience.
The Official All Star Café was born from Planet Hollywood International, the celebrity-backed restaurant empire that had stormed into New York on October 22, 1991, with backing from Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Demi Moore, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Five years later, Planet Hollywood launched its sports counterpart. The All Star Café opened on December 18, 1995 in Times Square — a cavernous roughly 600-seat restaurant with a live scoreboard in the center, sky box mezzanine booths, regular booths shaped like baseball mitts, and roughly 70 video monitors covering every wall. The draw: six superstar investor partners — Andre Agassi, Wayne Gretzky, Ken Griffey Jr., Joe Montana, Shaquille O'Neal, and Monica Seles. Tiger Woods joined the roster later.
The walls groaned under memorabilia: the backboard Shaq had famously collapsed in Phoenix, Andre Agassi's cut-off ponytail, Babe Ruth's camel-hair coat. Charlie Sheen loaned his T206 Honus Wagner card, displayed in plexiglass near the main bar — and in March 1998, it vanished. Restaurant employees had orchestrated a heist, stashing the card behind a ceiling panel in the stockroom. One of the conspirators was later pardoned by President Obama in December 2016.
Expansion came fast: locations opened in Cancún and on the Las Vegas Strip in 1996, at Disney's Wide World of Sports complex in 1997, plus a handful of other tourist zones. But the empire crumbled as quickly as it rose. Planet Hollywood filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in October 1999, and again in October 2001. The All Star Café's revenues slid from $96.5 million to $75 million in 1999. The Times Square flagship — the one that had felt like the center of the sports universe — closed in September 2000, its space absorbed by Planet Hollywood itself. The last location, at Disney's Wide World of Sports complex, held on until September 23, 2007, when it finally shuttered.
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