Doughboys - Rockdoughberfest: Hard Rock Cafe with Scott Gairdner

Episode Date: October 22, 2015

As Rockdoughberfest continues, the 'boys welcome Moonbeam City creator and Funny or Die alum Scott Gairdner to the podcast, to review the rock restaurant that started it all: Hard Rock Cafe. Plus, the premiere of The Leftovers.Want more Doughboys? Check out our Patreon!: https://patreon.com/doughboysSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

After rock and roll cemented itself as the dominant genre of American popular music in the 1950s, the 60s saw the emergence of a heavier, basin-distortion-dominant subgenre known as Hard Rock. In 1971, American restaurateurs Peter Morton and Isaac Tigret took the creative leap of making it the concept of their London eatery. Morton came from a chain restaurant legacy, being the son of the namesake of Morton Steakhouse. Meanwhile, Tigret had rock music in his bones, later demonstrated when he co-founded House of Blues with Dan Aykroyd and even married Ringo Starr's ex-wife.

The duo's London outlet was a success, but it wasn't until almost a decade after its opening when they added the signature decorative element that would be cribbed by imitators like Planet Hollywood, music memorabilia decking their walls. This turned out to be the secret sauce that would build it into a global brand with its many multinational locations and associated t-shirts and apparel, serving as shrines to American music and cuisine worldwide. The Seminole tribe purchased the chain in 2007 for nearly $1 billion and today, in addition to the 150-plus restaurants around the world, the brand includes 21 hotels and 10 casinos.

This week on Doe Boys, Rocktoberfest 2015 continues with the granddaddy of the mall, Hard Rock Cafe. Welcome to Doe Boys, the podcast about chain restaurants. I'm Nick Weiger, alongside my co-host, Mike Mitchell, the Spoon Man. How you doing, Spoon Man? I'm doing all right. What's going on? I just want to give a big...

How the hell? ...to Spoon Nation and also a big... What are you playing? You're queuing something up on your phone. What? Okay! All right. Okay.

Is that what an okay from Lil Jon or is that what an okay from the Chappelle show Sketch about Lil Jon? Well, if you don't know, then you shouldn't know about it. Either way, it feels like you're taking another thing that was popularized at a Comedy Central show and appropriating it as part of the Spoon Man brand, your personal brand. I don't know about that. Again, I'd also say too, I feel like we're welcoming new listeners into the fold. If you're new to the show, welcome.

We're happy to have you. Please don't be alienated by the fact that the show begins with Mike Mitchell giving a shout out to his basically his collective in-joke, the people who have joined Spoon Nation. Wow. This is an attack on Spoon Nation. No, it's not an attack on your fans, Spoon Nation. I just feel like it's like a thing that you're...

It's just hard to grasp, I think, up top if you aren't familiar with it. Well, you're right. People who tune in for the first time aren't going to be turned off by, in 1971, a group of people came together and started a restaurant. Fuck that opening. You know what? I give Spoon Nation what they want. If mine was that as devoid of specifics as yours was, I could see there being a complaint,

but I'm trying to convey some information. You could tell he was a rock and roll guy because he went on to marry Ringo's wife. What the fuck? At least I'm proud of the no work I do for this show. I think that's an interesting bit of trivia, that Ringo Starr's ex-wife married the co-founder of the Hard Rock Cafe. That's interesting, isn't that? Doesn't that at least qualify as interesting?

I sort of lost it from the intro to now. Now I'm listening. Now I'm paying attention, but I couldn't remember the fact. When Mitch was misremembering it, I realized I had lost it. So maybe it's me as a litmus test, but I don't know. I might have just, you know what? I might have just powered through it a little too, but I maybe didn't linger on it enough. Did you say there was a seminal tribe?

Seminal tribe, yeah. Interesting. That is interesting. You gave me a fact I liked. It was good. Okay. Well, I'll aim for that in the future. I'll try to pepper in one fact that you like.

It's going to be one of those episodes, folks. Wario has the slowest acceleration, but the highest top speed. That one's for Mike Mitchell. That's all the fat characters, though. That's the true of every fat Mario Kart. If you go off the course at Rainbow Road, Lakitu will bring you back and deduct two coins. Hey, I don't know what you're talking about. I'm a toad man.

Can I stay on the track, baby? Of course you are. What? Who does that mean? I think of course you take the... So it's sort of escapism or something you're trying to imply? No, I feel like you'd take the sexless genderless... Blob of dough.

Sexless? He's as phallic as any Mario character there is. I don't know. I guess he is male because there's Toadette, who drives a similar cart. Oh, Toadfuck's, my man. All right, let's introduce our guest. He chimed in a little bit. We're very, very happy to have him.

The creator of the very, very funny Moonbeam City on Comedy Central, the man behind Tiny Fuppets, and many of the very best Fun of Your Die videos. Scott Gairdner is here. Hi, Scott. Hello. How's it going? Very, very honored to be here. It's been a real joy for a couple months imagining this moment, and now it's happening

in real life, and it's everything I dreamt. You're here at Feral Audio. Our producer Dustin is out there working the boards, making it all happen. Yeah, we're getting into it. It's a pleasure for us to have you here. It's a real treat. We're excited we were able to make this happen. I'm sure our listeners are excited to hear your dulcet tones through their headsets or

ear buds or laptop speakers, however they're listening to this. Well, that sets a bar, and now I've got to get more, a lot more dulcet. No, no. You're fine. Your natural speaking voice is lovely. So Scott, you're a SoCal boy like myself. Where are you from specifically? I'm from Woodland Hills, which is deep in the San Fernando Valley, kind of the western

most point of it before it becomes a Thousand Oaks in Ventura County and all that. So just a little outside of LA proper, but very much a part of LA County. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The outskirts, and I always say it feels very Ohio or Texas or something, but just happens to be a half an hour away from Hollywood on the stars. But yeah, but a very, yeah, it could be anywhere, really, yeah, yeah. Okay, so growing up in SoCal, growing up in Woodland Hills, where were you like, oh, I'm really excited to go eat here?

Like were there local spots or were there chains you were into or? Yeah, it was pretty chain-centric, I suppose. The chain McDonald's was loomed very large. I feel like I remember a lot of the old sit-down pizza huts when that was more of a thing. I feel like that part of the valley especially is still littered with a lot of banks and Korean barbecues that clearly used to be that kind of still have the pizza hut shape. Yeah, I love the pizza hut coffin that is now a different business. The same thing happened with those old school Taco Bells.

We've talked about it on the podcast before, the ones that used to be mission-styled with an actual physical bell, and then they got turned into like now it's Tai Bell or now it's like a funeral home that still has that Taco Bell architecture. You just have to try to turn the bell into something else. Yeah, yeah. It's like a big quinceanera dress or a helmet or they paint a little guy under it. If an old Taco Bell turns into a helmet store, there's a lot of, you could be creative if you...

They're mostly helmet stores. I think so, yeah, yeah. I feel like that idea of a Taco Bell turning into a funeral home was the most depressing thing I've ever heard in my life. Particularly because it would be filled up after that six coffins and then you're moving on to the next one. There wouldn't be a lot of space. It would smell probably still like food or something.

It would never go away. It was just a very depressing thought to kind of take in. Always a hypothetical, so put it out of your mind. That's a burger boy for you. So did they have round table pizza up there? Because that was a big thing we used to go to in Lakewood or Long Beach, California. Yeah, I remember one in Thousand Oaks that I was very fond of. I was like, I think Pizza Hut was this way too.

I have a lot of fondness for sort of the kind of brown and brick style, the sort of gentle beige family ties kind of style of the early 80s and I feel like old Pizza Huts were very much that way. I remember one in Thousand Oaks with some nice stained glass and it felt like a lot more of a formal sit down kind of place probably than a current round table pizza. Though I haven't tried one in a while. That might be a good... I forget if you guys have done that or that'd be an interesting one.

I've had it in San Diego within the past five years and I remember it just being fine. But I remember that was like our go-to pizza chain for most of my youth and we would go there. Pizza. And that was like also a thing. I feel like the old school pizza parlor is pre-internet. That's where I would like discover a new arcade game. I mean, sometimes sure at the arcade, but also I would go there and be like, oh, Cadillacs

and dinosaurs. What is this? I remember I saw the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game even existed. Thought Ninja Turtles were so cool going in and went to my friend's birthday party at Lampost Pizza, which is another chain that I might be defunct now. But we went to Lampost Pizza, we went inside there and there was a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles the arcade game cabinet and I was just like, there's a fucking Ninja Turtles game.

I was like, I lost my mind. It was like so crazy. And I feel like you don't get that experience anymore of just not knowing something exists until you encounter it in its final form, you know? Sure. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, Pizza, Pizza Places as like, you know, kid, teenager hangouts. I have a lot of fond memories of and, you know, post-little league kind of, yeah.

I kind of wish it was more that way still, like we all, you know. We all went to get pizza and play video games. Yeah, absolutely. I agree with that. That's always what I want to be doing when I'm like, you know, trying to crowd into villains taverns, some like cramped, you know, hipster haven. I always just want to be at an open space. Yeah, absolutely.

Room to breathe and Adam's family pinball. And it was good to hear like you being like, oh, these video games, it's like good to hear like the moments before you were pummeled into a pile of piss in blood. What you were excited about Ninja Turtles video game and then just destroyed by a group of bullies. Am I correct on that or no? So wait, so you're you're like openly fantasizing about an eight to nine year old boy being beaten until he bleeds and urinates all over himself.

That's a Spoon Man's idea of a pleasing mental image. A specific eight to nine year old boy. I was, I was, you know, I encountered my fair share of of mean other kids, but I don't think I was particularly bullied. I think I was probably average popularity pretty much throughout throughout my elementary, middle school, high school days. Maybe some of us had doubts. Well, assuming did you out loud express excitement about Cadillacs and dinosaurs or did you

internalize it because that might have affected the level of bullying that you good point. Certainly the circle of friends and fuck, I can't even remember any of their names, but certainly the circle of friends I was with that that particular birthday party would have been totally cool with me enjoying a Ninja Turtles arcade and let me clear it up to it's the piss came from you saying Cadillacs and dinosaurs and you pissing your pants from excitement and then getting pummeled by the bullies. I got it. Oh, it's because of the piss, not because of the video game.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm gonna change around a little bit. I'm really glad you cleared up the order of events. You know what? I know Jack Allison agrees with me, but sometimes you need some bullies in this world. OK, this is where this is where the Doughboys podcast gets into some hot water. Co-host takes pro-bullying stance. Well, and also, you know, you guys have been embroiled in the Chick-fil-A controversy.

Oh, sure. We've tackled every controversy head on, like little coward boys. I bet you tried to handle Subway with kid gloves, but then Fran is making jokes willy-nilly and being very disrespectful, I feel. I just was trying to be lay-off because I know that Jared is like a big inspiration to Nick. It's weird how he's like, just recently was an inspiration to you. OK. Suddenly started vocalizing your life-long appreciation.

I was also gonna say, I was bullied as a child, too, and it made me stronger, man. Oh, fuck this. What have I done? No, I believe you. I believe that, like, you probably developed some thicker skin, but maybe, you know, kids shouldn't have to endure that. I agree with that. Maybe that shouldn't be a toughening process that we view as a rite of passage. I was joking.

This show wasn't just about talking dryly into the microphone about burgers for God's sakes. Alright, sit down. I'm gonna fucking bully you in a few minutes. I got a Doughboys confession. Never been to Round Table Pizza. You know, I don't think that's probably, I'm sure you're not alone on that. I'm sure a lot of our listeners have maybe not even heard of Round Table Pizza. I think that is a fairly regional thing.

But I think, yeah, they are pretty present on the West Coast. Yeah, I'd say Round Table Pizza is... It looks stupid, I'll say. It's a dumb name, and they kind of have this kind of, like, this Knights of the Round Table theme, which really, like, just, it's just totally arbitrary. It's just like, like, Long John Silver's, OK, we've got a pirate, a nautical theme for our seafood restaurant. I get it. Like, Round Table Plus Pizza, it's like we've got the Knights of King Arthur, plus an Italian, like, delicacy.

It just doesn't make any sense. But the pizza is probably mid-level quality, very sauce heavy. I don't know if you remember this guy, just like a lot of sauce. I have zero memory of the food content of that place. I remember a stained glass window. They do have a stained glass, yeah. A lovely stained glass. It's so great, like, when I was a little kid and I wanted to go get pizza,

like, nothing got me more excited for pizza than, like, a reminder of church. That's so funny. Like, oh, cool, a stained glass window? Yeah, I don't know why they... That was a theme? I think it was for atmosphere. Just like, yeah, you kind of get the light going, refracting through the panes of colored glass would kind of give an interesting effect, but...

Why also... Because I agree with you that medieval theming is very arbitrary, and it's making me think about, like, miniature golf courses of which there's... Oh, yeah. There's a few in the valley. What's the plate? Malibu Castle Park or something, another one in Burbank. But why so often is miniature golf and arcade paired with medieval? There's no particular correlation there.

I have no idea. That's a really, really great point. It has absolutely nothing to do with it. People back then wouldn't like it. Like, there's, like, everything about it is strange. And even... I mean, maybe it comes from, like... I know, like, my dad is...

I think he's on my parents' honeymoon. I think they went to St. Andrew's, like, old Scottish kind of, like... You know, kind of a nice old manor is the clubhouse. And I think golf maybe ultimately ties into a sort of pastoral English-Scottish feel. Oh, that makes sense. But I'm giving it too much... I think I'm giving that too much credit as the connection. You know what I think it might be?

You know how kind of, like... And Scott, you and I... Do you certainly... You and I certainly know this world from doing internet comedy for a while. Like, sometimes I feel like people in internet comedy... It's kind of, like, the first idea they think of is, like, a ninja. You know, like, oh, that's random, a fucking ninja, you know? So there's, like, so much, like, ninja jokes and ninja comedy.

I feel like it's kind of the same... There was, like, an era where, like, the first, like, oh, we should have a theme. What about a medieval theme? It was just, like, the first idea. And if you're... I don't know, you're a guy who runs a mini-golf. You're not maybe a creative-minded person. You're just, like, I don't fucking know.

I just want to... I'm just trying to make this business work for my family. Maybe you're just running with the first idea that someone pitches and just saying, fine, we'll make it a castle thing. Well, let's see, if you see a castle off the freeway, it catches your attention. It's relatively easy to turn a regular building into a castle with a spy. You just got to add, you know, a couple of arches on either side. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But if there was, like, a space one, like, that would stand out in the marketplace. It'd be like, oh, space golf, like, oh, that's a little different. That place has a space theme. I feel like there is some space mini-golf. But also, I want to say that that guy who's in charge of his family is doing a terrible job. And he's just like, I don't know, do this. It's like, well, no, invest your money in time better than that, than panicking and making a medieval mini-golf place.

Why is he so panicked from the get-go? I don't know, look, I'm just trying to... Why'd you get into this line of work if you're... Do anything else. Do you like mini-golf? Guys, guys, fucking lay off this imaginary guy that I created as an example. Stop giving him such a hard time. You gotta think about what you say, man.

I want to say that Knight's Armor, I think of much as medieval time as I do of ghost spooky stuff. It's one of those things that makes me think of medieval time, and then it also makes me think of a haunted house where the armor is standing there and then it moves or something like that later on. Scott, I know you're a big Disney guy. Is there at the haunted mansion... Do you know the haunted mansion well? It's an attraction you know well? Certainly, yes.

Is there a suit of armor there? Is that a feature in it? I can't recall it specifically. I want to say there's some suits of armor leaning around that place, but it's not like a major... It's just one of many things in there. But you're right, it's always... Why suits of armor in otherwise non-medieval? And we're like...

I guess because you're in a fancy mansion, and so people in fancy mansions collect nice medieval things. I don't know. I guess in anything, in any sort of clue type movie or anything. Yeah, why suits of armor, I'm not really sure. I feel like part of it must be because it's good for a ghost to take control of a suit of armor. Oh yeah. Maybe it's going a little too deep into it,

but yeah, maybe because of that, but yeah, I've always wondered. It's such a thing. Well, if you're non-corporeal, that's like okay, it can take this chassis and sort of be assumed humanoid form. So it kind of... If you want to haunt someone, you can clank around like that and maybe harm them physically. I would also think like so many things in our culture,

it probably owes its origins to the Capcom game Ghouls and Ghosts, where Arthur the Knight was battling a bunch of scary spooky monsters, and so probably it had that sort of association in people's minds. That's a good point, and he was wearing... He was wearing a suit of armor, and then if you got struck, he would be wearing his underwear. Yeah, if you got hit once, your armor shot off of you. Yeah, really ineffective armor. In every direction, and just leaving a loincloth kind of.

Those like super armors were really fantastic. This is one of the only video games I kind of know, really, but that like sort of the souped-up green one and the... Oh, the gold one, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You could look pretty sharp in those games. Those would be suits of armor to haunt. A lot more stylin' than boring old silver.

One of my friends, sorry, real quick, bitch. One of my friends in elementary school told me about that there was a way... I can't remember which friend this was, but he told me that there was a way for after you take off Arthur's armor, he gets hit once and his armor flies off and he's wearing just underwear, and he said like, if you got hit just right, you could make his underwear fly off and like see his dick and butt. So it was like a glitch in one frame of...

Yeah. I just wanted to see up that nice skirt. What's he packin'? Your Super Nintendo controller's buttons were worn off. Why is this bee born to a nub pounded all the way into the... Oh my God. Now I gotta say, I've never been shot before. Do your clothes fly off?

Only if you're shot by a skeleton or a ghoul. Oh, okay. Because it's sort of a metaphysical type of hurt and it emanates from your heart into all directions so everything just goes flying. Jeff Dutton always had a good point about a ghost with a gun. I think you wanted to turn it into a thing for a long time. That's a fucking great idea.

Why does a ghost never have a gun? Yeah, like an arm... You know the other thing I feel like has been unexplored is like animal ghosts. I always thought there could be something to like, okay, this is a haunted zoo and there's a fucking leopard ghost and like an elephant ghost and like bear ghost, you know what I mean? And like someone's trapped in this haunted zoo and they're being pursued by all these animal ghosts.

Maybe you could do some sort of like, make some sort of vegetarian, you know, anti-animal cruelty like a point and set it in a slaughterhouse or something, you know? Oh, sure. But then, but are there... Do the animal ghosts have the powers because a ghost is translucent and see-through? What can ghosts do?

So if you get tackled by... Yeah, in general, besides sort of chase and... I guess it's unclear what ghosts can do. Like if they can like... I guess they can hurt you, right? Or can they just scare you? Yeah, what's this... Well, this is...

I mean, this is a good time. We're not off topic. This is a great time to talk about. I know it's rock doberfest. But we're... The first mention, 35 minutes in... Anything related to food or... Take it easy.

We're 25 minutes. It's right around this time of year. You know, it's Halloween time. This is coming out a week before Halloween. What is the... What's the scariest type of ghost? To me, just seeing a ghost is scary. Nick's leopard ghost is stupid and I wouldn't be scared.

I can't wait to your Kickstarter 10 years from now. Help me make the animal ghost movie. I'm Nick Weiger. I think I... Former Doughboys guy. I think 10 years from now I'll be making the Kickstarter for a... Let's make this documentary to remember Mike Mitchell. Taken from us so young.

By his own hand. It's less of a kind tribute and more of an incredibly slanted... Diatribe. Many people interviewed but seemingly with words forced into their mouth. Everyone talks like Wiker. Oh, God. I'll see. That'll be a good Kickstarter. To answer your question, I feel like the scariest kind of ghost is like...

I'm thinking of the ghost from the Patrick Swayze movie ghost. Or I'm thinking like the ghost from The Sixth Sense. The ghost from Patrick Swayze's ghost? Not Patrick Swayze specifically. The subway guy? The subway guy. He's like a normal, he seems like he's functioning but then you get to his ghost part and he's like... He goes crazy and starts freaking out and it's the same sort of thing in Sixth Sense where it's like...

Please, I swear, I didn't steal that man's horse. It's just like they're all kind of haunted and don't really know... Don't understand their own curse and that kind of drives him crazy. I'm kind of scared of that because I'm like, oh shit, I would hate to become that. Become the kind of ghost who's kind of trapped in this spectral plane and isn't really aware of their own... Doesn't even have like a sense of their own consciousness anymore. In this audio booth talking about how you can see Arthur's penis... The seance would be held and you tell people about how you can see his little tiny penis.

The scariest ghost is one that can lift up Arthur's skirt revealing his penis for all to see. Oh god, why does my skirt keep flapping up as if out of my control? My answer is a ghost with a big scary mouth that stretches really far. Whenever you see that in a movie, they're about to chase you and then their face gets so long and their mouth gets so wide. Does that make them any more powerful or effective? I don't know. But boy, scary mouth. You'll be pissing like Weigher at a pizza place. Oh for sure. I have an answer for it and I think I'm kind of on board with Nick's.

I'm not afraid of like a killer ghost. I mean like of course it's scary but that's stupid. Also, side note, I do believe in ghosts which Nick Weigher loves to make fun of me for. I just don't know. I don't know what this universe is all about. Maybe there's a plane where spirits or some sort of energy exists. Oh god, I'm losing members of Spoon Nation like immediately. He's a kook. He's like Dan Aykroyd or something. I thought he's a cool comic guy but it turns out. I kind of believe it and the scariest ghost to me is older lady ghost. Oh I can see that.

Old lady ghost is really, I don't know why. Because I think old ladies are some of the nicest, most wonderful. I loved my grandmas. Old lady ghost is really, really scary to me. I don't know why that is. Like a scarier than a guy ghost. I don't care about a guy. You know what I think it might be? I wonder if it has something to do with like it's the flip of what you're saying. Where you've like oh this is like the gentlest, most pleasant person to be around. Someone who have like a natural sort of rapport with. And then just seeing them in kind of like this hellish demonic form.

It's like oh even that can become cursed and befouled. I wonder if there's some sort of subconscious, on some subconscious level that's what's happening. Yeah that's interesting. Like now I think about like oh a witch is like a wicked old lady. I wonder why that is. It's a strange concept. It's also too like I feel like you know when the horror movie cliche of like the slowed down children's song. Or like you know like the little kid who's got like who's really fucked up. Like the scary little ghost girl. Like I feel like it's kind of operating in the same principle. Like a little music box chime or something.

The things that are supposed to be gentle and nice sort of getting recontextualized. Yeah that's terrifying. I think scary kid ghost and that sort of thing is probably second in line. If you just think about going, walking down your hallway or something. And what you saw to me, old lady just standing there ghost. You know it doesn't have to be like you know just standing there in a black suit. That would be scary to me. I don't know. A bunch of ghosts in a former Pizza Hut or Taco Bell would actually be the

if you walked into one that had recently closed. And then all the oven doors are creaking and opening and ghost pizzas are flying. She knows it's slipping without anyone flipping them. I think that 13 ghosts is the scariest of all. 13 together in one house. No one has seen that movie have they? No. Well there was the original one. It might have even been a Disney movie.

There's the original 13 ghosts back in the day. It was kind of like a little bit of a campier throwback. And then there was a contemporary one with who was it? Was it Matthew? Who was in it? It was the guy from Scream was in it. What the fuck's his name? Lillard? Matthew Lillard. Yeah.

That one's good because my friend and our former guest Jim Woods brought this up. Like the trailer's like what's scarier than one ghost? Two ghosts. What's scarier than two ghosts? Three ghosts. What's scarier than three ghosts? Thirteen ghosts. Like either go all the way.

So there are four by that logic. Everything is scarier. Any number is scarier than... Well then really the way to sell that movie would have been what's scarier than 13 ghosts? Nothing. So don't but if some other movie comes along saying if a movie comes out that called more than 13 ghosts,

don't see it. It's not going to be scary. And that's not even true. I feel like the more and more ghosts you get, say there was a billion ghosts, it wouldn't be scary anymore. Yeah, well that's the haunted mansion at Disneyland. How many ghosts are in there? 999 happy haunts.

Yeah. And you're at a thousand. Yeah, by that point they're happy haunts. They're having a gay old time. You're going there and they're having, they're throwing a big party. It's not really all that scary. You know those Hitchhikers are in your vehicle and you're like, hey, it's those guys.

No one's freaking out and screaming about that. One last ghost note. We can get into goats too if we want. One last ghost note. I love that effect on the haunted mansion ride when the ghost is sitting between you and your ride partner in the mirror when you look. Yeah. It looks kind of like a pup.

I think it is, right? Isn't it that the trick of it is that it is some sort of kind of animatronic puppet and they make it look like a ghostly figure that's sitting between the two of you? I think something's on the other end of that glass moving alongside you. Yes. So it parallels your, yeah, I always, if I'm with my wife on that, we always make her scoot to make room for the ghost in the middle.

Okay, get to the corner. It's not going to work if it's sitting on top of us. Have you seen the hat box ghost? That's the new, it was like a thing that was apparently there when the ride opened in the 60s and was deemed too scary and pulled out after a couple months and now it is back. I went back there recently enough after the hat box ghost was back, but I didn't know what I was looking for or where to look.

Like what is the hat box ghost? It kind of has its own little section in the ride. Gotcha. He's sort of an old-timey top hat wearing guy carrying a big old hat box. You know, hat boxes, which everybody, you see hat boxes on the street every day. But his face shifts back and forth between his head and being inside the box. Oh, I think I did see this guy. Which does not on its own sound particularly scary.

I guess to a late 60s audience, it was more terrifying. But it had all this mythos to it because there was only like one 16 millimeter video that anybody ever took proving it was there. So there was a lot of mystery of like, oh, did it ever even exist? And now it's, now they have put it back in there. Because I think the hat box ghost figures into the Guillermo del Toro movie that is coming out. Oh, interesting. So they're pre-setting up.

Another thing I like is that it was apparently in someone's contract, somewhere in the making of the Eddie Murphy Haunted Mansion movie, it was said that if the movie did a certain amount of business that they would replace the head in the crystal ball, the Madame Leota I think is the character, is that they would replace it with Jennifer Tilly. So if that movie had done better amount of it, why is Jennifer Tilly in this ride now? So like kind of like the addition of Jack Sparrow to the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, how that became a later added element after the success of those movies.

Yeah, a much more successful iteration of that because I guess people like Jack Sparrow apparently. Give me a Pirates free Jack Sparrow. It really fucking annoyed me actually when I saw him. Wait, you don't like him in the ride? No, get him out of there. Ah, he's great. Those movies are fucking stupid. No, they're fun. They're a lot of fun.

I've never seen them, but I appreciate, I like that he's in there because he's such a good, articulate, realistic character. Yeah, it looks cool. So I appreciate the model work of it. The original reason. It does look good. Yeah, it looks great. It's like the fake hair like Indiana Jones and the Indiana Jones ride.

It's an iconic part of the franchise now. Even though it came about after the ride, I think it absolutely belongs. This is a topic for another podcast. God. All right. Well, like I mentioned earlier, we sometimes welcome new listeners to the fold if you are a new listener. That was the sitcom length dicking around not about food that we do at the top of every podcast. If there's trims, feel free to make trims.

I won't be upset. We can't talk as much about this restaurant that's just like every other rock dober restaurant. We've really dug ourselves a hole with this theme of just going to the same place every week. This one has a different type of tortilla chips and more of a barbecue bench than, oh, it's a world of difference. And it's a rock theme. And a rock theme. Well, you know what, Scott, you actually, because we talked about having you on the podcast before, we wanted to have you on for a while, and you actually brought up Hard Rock Cafe.

Yeah. And that was prior to us even planning on this Rocktoberfest promotion, so we figured we'd work it in here. So why Hard Rock Cafe? Why was this the one you chose? Well, the immediate answer is that I was listening to the, I believe the aforementioned Jim Woods episode on The Wait. I was listening. I was passing the time on a very slow, frustrating drive from Toronto to Niagara Falls. And so I was thinking about, I was enjoying the Doughboys, and I was also realizing that I was on my way to a hotel that,

within the confines of the hotel, had both a Rainforest Cafe and a Hard Rock Cafe as part of the hotel. Got there a free, I want to say like a $10 voucher for the Hard Rock Cafe. So look, it pays for itself to go there. But I, in general, I've gotten to travel a lot over the last year, and I'm always intrigued by Hard Rock cafes. I'm always kind of drawn to them, at least to the outside of them, if I don't actually go in. But they're always in such tourist-centric places. They're always in places with just, where you imagine the real estate value is insane, and they seem to thrive. We were just at the one on Hollywood Island, right on Hollywood Boulevard.

There's one right in the heart of cool Rome, and there's one in a really beautiful square in Florence, and I was just in New York too. There's one in Times Square. They're always like, for being a thing that nobody particularly talks about or seems to particularly like or be enthusiastic about, they are just in the most prominent best locations in the world. And so I've always been sort of oddly intrigued by them. Also, I realized in thinking about my relationship with the Hard Rock Cafe, I realized that the first date of my life ever was to the Hard Rock Cafe at Universal City Walk. Oh wow, okay.

Because that was a Hard Rock Cafe I've been to previously, the one that's right by Universal Studios Hollywood, in kind of their shopping area. So what was that like, taking a girl out to the Universal City Hard Rock Cafe? Oh, what a delight, I'm sure somebody she thinks about all the time. This was a girl who was visiting from Houston, Texas, and 15-year-old Scott Gardner was like, how do I sweep this girl off her feet? How do I give her a real LA experience? Well, I got to take her to the coolest spot in Los Angeles, which is Universal City Walk, which I did honestly think at the time, and it worked for this Houston girl.

It was like, wow, all these shops and kooky cars flying into the walls. There's a hot topic, they got crazy shirts with skulls in there. So I don't know, it kind of worked, and I think it does still work on people, at City Walk in general. But also the Hard Rock Cafe, because hey, it's cool, there's a big guitar outside. I think there's a car rotating around in there too, and lots of great... Oh, yeah, the Universal City one there is, there's a big rotating lower end or something. Yeah, yeah, some convertible, something or other.

I also remember that on the way out, my dad explaining the notion of tipping to me, and my dad is a horrible tipper, so it's very... Well, depending on how they do, maybe a 10% continues to be a terrible tipper. Your dad was on a walkie-talkie telling you this for the date, right? Yeah, just outside, trying to keep it on low enough volume under the table that only I could hear, that it would just blend in with the rock music. You're right though, there is something to like a... Because we experienced this when we were being seated, Mitch was late, but you...

Mitch was considered... Didn't even apologize for it, just walked in with a big smile on his face. But you and Scott, you, myself and friend of the podcast, Evan Susser, who was our fourth, we were there, we went to be seated, and the guy asked us, the host asked us, like, oh, where are you guys from? Just assuming we're tourists, and we were like, oh, we're locals, and he was like, what did he say? He was like, oh, you're the first party of locals today or something, and he seemed to be like that never happens.

It never happens. You're the first locals here, you fucking idiot. What are you doing? It's a funny number of restaurants to choose from, and you chose. But so many tourists must go to places like this and be like, oh, this is what L.A. is, this Hollywood and Highland complex that's just filled with these chain restaurants or Universal City Walk, or going to these other cities. Oh, this Times Square in New York, this is what New York is, you know.

When it's really not, it's something specifically targeted towards getting tourist business. Yeah, which makes sense for L.A. and New York, but then why, yeah, if you're in Florence, what is the point in going to the Hard Rock Cafe unless you're kind of sort of snarkily making fun of it like me? I don't know, but they fill up everywhere, and they seem to be like a big anchor location to all of those kinds of, and Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and Fisherman's Wharf, and yeah, it's always such a centerpiece to big touristy places, and it works. It's like really thriving, and that's kind of the other thing about it, like the one we went to tonight,

you know, just super full and packed and busy on a random Thursday night. And they have continued to thrive, like they opened new locations, and I was looking up, they opened a new restaurant in Brazil and Costa Rica this year. Meanwhile, Planet Hollywood, which is kind of a similar idea, like there's only six of those left in the world. It's just an utterly decaying franchise, and Planet Hollywood is actually kind of a success story. I think there was also like a fashion cafe. Oh yeah, I remember fashion cafe. You know, Claudia Schiffer or whatever, lend her name to, I think only one ever opened.

I think there was a sports cafe in Times Square that never took off. I know there was an announced David Copperfield magic cafe. That's a bad idea. The magic themed, oh imagine, yeah, little magic shows done by every waiter. You know what the problem with that is, is that there's just not enough magicians. Like I feel like you try to name magicians, you can maybe name like six to ten magicians unless you're really into magic. I don't know if that's a world problem, but I don't know. I'm in a problem with the business model.

I remember I was a big, I was big into magic at one point, of course, because I'm a loser. Just like all three of us are, and I went and got some magic stuff, and I really liked David Copperfield, and I would do some magic for my family, and I went to a David Copperfield show, and the last trick, by the way, so stupid, I remember like rolling my eyes as a young boy, where he's like, it was always great to be a little boy, and I'd never saw the snow, and then like he puts the blanket out of him, and then like a little boy is there, that's supposed to be like a little David Copperfield, and it snows, and I was just like, what the fuck? And I was like eight years old, and I was like, this is so bad.

And then my love affair with magic ended, because I went out to the hallway, and they're like, you can have David Copperfield like sign something for you, and he was sitting up on a table on a chair, and I walked by, and he just like stares at people as they walk by, and I was like, this guy sucks. Never did magic, I never, I still like card tricks, they're fun, but I agree with you, I don't think a magic themed restaurant would work, and I actually think Planet Hollywood is actually kind of the best of, I mean, I guess like a rock café is the other best idea, but like, I'm like, oh, Planet Hollywood, you have a bunch of like, you got action movies playing, you got a bunch of signed stuff from people,

like to me, it's that same thing as a hard rock, but I guess that there's just a little bit more behind, hard rock was one of the first ones, I went to the one in London when I was in like third grade, I was the first one, I guess, and my dad and my godparents, and we went there, and it was like, and my sister had mono, and she and my mom stayed home, but like, we... Sorry, I'm very sorry. Yeah, it actually was a bummer. Now I'm even, now I'm really sorry, I kind of said a half hearted sorry. No, no, no, it was bad, they still think about it.

I'm just kidding. But yeah, I felt like then, it was like a thing that we stopped by, that made me sound like we're like, even we stopped by, we were as dumb as any family there is, but I was like, yeah, we went by that place and it seemed like a big deal or something at the time. Yeah, you know, and going back to what you said just real quick, I feel like on the Planet Hollywood, I think you made a good point is on the surface, Planet Hollywood is the best theme for one of these types of restaurants, like movies, movie memorabilia, it's so much cooler to be like, oh wow, that's fucking, this is not the right reference, but just to say, like, oh that's the Lone Rangers mask,

versus that's totally the wrong reference. Let's not say the Lone Rangers mask, look, that's Batman suit, that's the bat suit from Batman Begins, that's so much cooler than seeing like Axl Rose's jacket from the Welcome to the Jungle tour, you know what I mean? And so like, and it's like, oh, but why hasn't Planet Hollywood been able to sustain itself and endure, and Hard Rock Cafe is still a growing brand, like especially when rock is kind of on the way out, and observation, you made a dinner of like, rock is kind of like less and less relevant these days, and yet this brand is still kind of on the scene.

And Hard Rock in particular, I don't feel like the Hard Rock Cafe has ever necessarily represented actual Hard Rock, because if you're like a metalhead, it's not like they're playing like deep metal in that restaurant, so I don't know what Hard Rock means to them, because usually, like in the Niagara Falls when I was at, I just remember hearing Everclear and like, maybe like Marcy Playground, so like, their definition of Hard Rock is pretty soft and set in about 1998, and so why does it persist when like, when movies sort of feel eternal, and seeing movie props just seems cool, like, you know, wow, I was just in one where like, oh, the mask, it's the mask from the mask, that still is cool to me.

Yeah, that's still cool. As a 30-year-old. But somebody like, you know, was a mask from Mask or The Mask? From The Mask. Hey, wait, what's Mask? Was it Eric Stoltz's giant head or prosthetic head from the Cher movie? Oh man, I don't even know the... Do you remember this, there was this Fox promotion, there was a period where,

I think it might have been, when would the mask come out, maybe 1991, does that sound right? 1993, maybe? 1994. Smoking, yeah. Whatever that... Well, that's right, yeah, yeah, yeah, somebody stop me right at 94. What year was I saying that constantly in school? That was like, when that came out, there was a time when, and it might have been when Fox had the rights to air it on TV,

but they did a special night of television where they did the mask visual effects on all of the Fox shows. You know how like, sometimes they'll have like a theme night of like, oh everyone's doing the powers out on all the NBC shows, and we're doing like a blackout episode where every sitcom is based around, they don't have any electricity. It was like a theme night, but it was based on like, we're taking all the Fox sitcoms and we're putting in the mask effects. So it would be like, Al Bundy would be like, you know, like,

have sex with your pig, and then like his eyes would bug out like the mask, but it was like a shitty version of it. It was like, you know, the MS DOS, like Commodore 64 graphic quality version of the mask, like it didn't look good at all. It's so weird. I usually remember stuff like this, and I don't remember this as well, and I really love this. I hope that there's clips of it somewhere, because that's insane.

Yeah, I should look for it and dig it up, because it was a thing I distinctly remembered. It's such an odd thing to have happened in retrospect. Could be a Weiger fever dream or something. You just wanted it. You loved the mask so much. You wanted it to be true on every... This is the post where I realized, this is the point in the podcast where I realized, I'm a ghost who has gone insane. Every story you've ever told on the show is completely made up.

So we went to the Hard Rock Cafe tonight. We went to the Hollywood and Highland location, which I think is a newer location, probably built in the last decade or so. That whole Hollywood and Highland mega complex, which has the Dolby Theatre, where they have the Oscars, it's like a fairly newly built thing. I know specifically speaking of stores going out of business, I'm pretty sure this is in the former location of the Virgin Megastore. Oh, okay, okay.

At that place and then it's... Oh yeah, I was even here for... I remember when the Virgin Megastore was here. I liked those, but... Yeah, it seems like a big fun place. I know, that's kind of strange. But let us tell you as Hollywood guys, this is where we're hanging out. The Hollywood and Highland shopping area is where all the people in Hollywood are all the time.

You got Elmo's there. I guess I can't explain to the listeners what a hellhole that stretch of Hollywood Boulevard is. It's truly a place I never want to be at. I like seeing movies at the Grumman's Chinese Theater there, but that specific stretch is just a nightmare for me. All the street performers, you can watch that very sad documentary about. Yeah, they don't make parking easy on you. Same with city walk.

Both of the Hard Rock cafes in this city are just like defying you to go there. They're so difficult to get to. You pay $20 for parking and you hike up this hill forever and ever. Yeah, just awful locations. They only work if you're staying at a hotel that steps away. And let's be honest, that's what this place is going for. There's no doubt on Earth, like we touched on. It is for tourists.

Yes. There's no one as good. And like we said, we were the only locals that were there. This is just a thing that people feel like they have to go to. But why I don't know. It's not a hit on the restaurant. They don't know why people feel like, because the Hollywood, like the planet Hollywood is more fun to me.

Like Hard Rock Cafe, it's like, oh, cool. There's like the shirt, the guy from Chumba Wamba War. Like who cares? Or somebody's guitar that it's like, even like, okay, like a Ringo, there was a Ringo star drum head. And admittedly, hey, Ringo star, one of the Beatles signed this thing, but you're still like, how many drum heads is Ringo star had? It's not like, you know, there's all probably only a couple of masks,

but how many Ringo star drum had? There's been thousands and thousands. And also we were talking a little bit about how they obtained this memorabilia. I, because they don't really say, and I think maybe some of it is donated, but I think a lot of it is just sort of bought at auction wholesale. I remember in the Niagara Falls location, there was a Neil Young guitar. And I thought Neil Young would have hated this place. Like, there's no way he willingly gave his guitar to the, yeah.

I touched on this when we were talking about it a little bit. Like, to me, giving your stuff to Hard Rock Cafe is like the last thing you'd want to do. Because like, I would rather, the first thing I'm going to do with stuff is donate it. The second thing I'm going to do is give it to friends or family or somebody who wants it. The third thing, which is very, very easy, is throw it in a big dumpster. Like, giving it to Hard Rock Cafe seems like the hardest thing to do. And I'm like, it gets you money, nor the fun of the heartwarming feeling of charity. It's none of it.

And it's like, it must have zero connection to you. If I'm going to give it to the Hard Rock Cafe, I'm like, oh yeah, fine. I don't care. Like, will you come and take this from me? Then sure, I'll give it to the Hard Rock Cafe. Paul McCartney is not giving his, like, the famous bass that he plays, his famous bass. He's not like, yeah, something, the important instrument is not going to go sit on a wall in Toledo or whatever. Exactly.

It's sold though, right? I feel like that must be, like you were saying that it's like, they may acquire a lot of this stuff at auction probably, right? I think so. I don't think anyone is donating their stuff. I think there's also two, I feel like part of it is they're trying to just overwhelm you with a volume of memorabilia and not even necessarily expecting you to pick out each individual piece. That's true. They don't attract you to like, this is the primary piece of memorabilia. Yeah.

It's all around and yeah. There's some stuff where you'd be like, oh, that's Shakira's dress from that video or whatever. It's like, oh, okay, I kind of get this. But then also like kind of tucked away in the corner is like, like, oh, here's a cocktail napkin that Scott Stapp shot a wad in in 1991. You know what I mean? It's like, there's just a bunch of stuff where it just doesn't matter and there's just so much of it, you know? I saw you breaking into that case. The alarm went off.

Just a quick lick, please. There's also kind of like a, there's kind of a gross like a wholesale nature to it where I feel like stuff has to be bought in bulk. Like somebody goes to some massive rock auction and just buys everything. The Niagara Falls location, I noticed that, I think there needs to be a lot more oversight in the labeling of the items. Yeah. Because a couple of things I noticed. One, there was a guitar that was said to have belonged to Paul Jones from Led Zeppelin. Like not John Paul Jones.

Oh, wow. Like they got, they went to the trouble. That one's kind of cool. A Led Zeppelin instrument and then they got the guy's name wrong. And there's something from the band Soul Asylum that was labeled Soul Decision, which is a really horrible boy band from the early tooth. So they got the name wrong. And then my favorite one, there was a guitar, kind of a cool like sparkly sort of, you know, jagged, cool 90s guitar that was labeled Cowabunga Dudes. What is Cowabunga Dudes?

And then I looked closer at it and it had been signed by Leonardo Donatello, Raphael and Michelangelo. So it clearly was part of the coming out of our Shells Ninja Turtles rock concert tour. I don't know if anybody's lucky enough to go to that or I watched the video of it a lot. But so this, yeah, this guitar is in their possession and they just somebody's taking notes. What is this? I don't know. It says Cowabunga Dudes on it. All right, fine.

The famous band Cowabunga Dudes. I will say that would have been cooler than like most of what we saw, like seeing a Ninja Turtles signed guitar. Sure. That's kind of, that's an interesting. Did we see anything of... There was kind of like a VIP section above where we were sitting. Yeah. That was weird that there even was a VIP section.

But there was a cut, there was like Shakira's thing that Nick was saying. Oh yeah, well on the way out I took a picture of a note written from Murray Wilson, the abusive father of Brian Wilson from the Beach Boys, that in the little Hard Rock Cafe description of what it was, it said, there's, we have many, many pieces of Murray Wilson's writing and this one is particularly dark. He says some horrible things about his wife. Why is this up next to where people are ordering chicken wings and fetus? It was definitely the most fascinating thing, but it was very strange that that was there.

If they didn't discuss, if they didn't call your attention to that he says malicious things about his own wife, you probably wouldn't read that far to notice. But now I know, I know that they have it. Yeah, there was a couple of weird things. Steven Tyler's pubic bush. It was all very strange, but should we talk about the food? Should we get into the... I think of course we should.

I mean, yeah, so like Hard Rock Cafe is a, their menu is, if you're not familiar with it, you might be expecting like, oh, this is going to be a pun-filled menu with a bunch of, you know, various dishes named after rockers or named after guitars and it's really not. It's very flatly presented menu. It's just sort of like all the, most of the drinks, there's a handful of exceptions. There's like a cocktail called like the purple haze, but most of the drinks and most of the entrees are just presented with like a very straightforward sort of normal name, like just like, here's a barbecue, you know, barbecue pulled pork with chicken.

You know, I mean, it's just like, it's very straight ahead and it's a little bit surprising considering how gimmicky the restaurant is overall that that's how they're presenting. A ton of barbecue stuff. A lot of barbecue, yeah. A big barbecue theme, which is really strange. Yeah, it's kind of hard to tell what their concept is exactly. They've got like some burgers and sandwiches. They've got some barbecue.

They've got like some steaks and salmon entrees. Fajitas. Fajitas, yeah. And a kind of odd item in the drinks menu where you can order a drink that comes with a personal side of, not to be shared side of chips and salsa, I believe with a sampler of like different colored margaritas. Yeah, they had a margarita flight. A little bento box of, oh.

Very strange. They had a margarita flight that came with three mini margaritas and then also in that box of margaritas came with chips and salsa, which is just really strange. I guess they're just, I don't know why they'd throw that in, but it's a really strange add-on for a cocktail just to come with its own chips. For when you don't want to share chips and salsa with your table. Yeah, I guess. Who does that?

It's no fun. So the drink I got was a, it was a Mai Tai that came in a mason jar. And they, you know, I think just talking about the merchandising side of their revenue stream is they have a lot of cocktails, including these that come with a beverage that you have as a take home container. So we got this, if you order this drink, it's like $15.99 and that includes the price of the mason jar that has a hard rock cafe logo emblazoned on it that you get to take home with you afterwards.

And I feel like that Mai Tai, for me, was just like so super sugary. Well, we'll get into your guys' cocktails in a second, but mine was just like so like, I like, Mitch, I know Mai Tai is your favorite drink and maybe you have some opinions on the sip you had of this one, but I, like for me, it was just like so overwhelmed with sweetness that I was just kind of like getting a headache from how much sugar I was consuming. And, you know, like just you lose kind of the boozy character of the cocktail when it just got so much, so much of that, that syrupy sugary character to it. And everything, I'd say every drink on that menu was very much bragging about all the liqueur

and the extra and the colors and the, yeah, it's very much that kind of. I think yours was called the hard rock in Mai Tai, which is the closest thing to a theme, at least. Yeah. For any of the food. We all tried to get, of 40 specialty cocktails, I think only five had custom names. Yeah. I believe I did the magical mystery mojito. Oh, yes.

Which was in no particular fashion a psychedelic trip. It was fine. It was a fine drink, but not, yeah, no mystery tour was had. I was expecting more of a psychedelic sort of like, oh, we're going to have some different colors kind of floating in this. And it looked like kind of just sort of like a clear to slightly white-tinged liquid. Yeah, yours looked like old water. Yeah.

That's pretty right on. And it sort of, you know, it bragged that it bragged. They weren't bragging, but just, you know, it said there was a cucumber in it. And like a cucumber drink is refreshing. That sounds nice. But then it just had sort of a big long stock of cucumber that just felt sort of straight off of the market shelf. Yeah.

Like not, it wasn't like, you know, like a little, you know, nice washed little slices. It was just a big old stiff stock. Yeah. It bothered me. It's like putting a dill pickle spear in your drink. It's just very strange and off-putting presentation-wise. It also looked like it had been like dug up recently. Like it had like that hard look, like the shell, you know, like the skin of the cucumber

looked kind of like hard and, yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's a little strange. And not, you know, unlike, I don't know, if you're drinking something with, you know, an orange slice or cherries in it and maybe you pop that in your mouth at the end and it's kind of soaked up the liquor and that tastes good. Like I don't really want a gin-soaked long cucumber sliver. Gin doesn't taste like anything, first of all.

And, yeah, it was very odd now that I think about it. Not worthy of the fun Beatles song that it's named after. No way was it worthy of that song. I got one that was called the Summer Splash Dackery. And it was good. I mean, it was, I thought it was the best, I thought it was better than your drink, Nick, because I try that Mai Tai. Yeah.

Mai Tai is my favorite drink, probably. And then that one was too way too sugary. And this thing was super sugary as well, but I just liked it. It was like a slurpee, like kind of orangey lemon, there was a lot of strawberry going on in there. You had a sip of it, right? Yeah. I mean, I kind of got some mango.

Was it a mango character to it or was that just tasting something? There was a lot of shit going on. Okay. I felt like I tasted a lot of strawberry, a lot of like, yeah, maybe mango or orange or citrus. You know, definitely citrus, but some sort of combo of that. But it was good. It looked nice too.

It kind of had like this layered sort of creamsicle look to it. Yeah. Yeah. A little pink, a little yellow slash orange, and it tasted good. It was kind of, it was frozen as well, a frozen drink. It was good. I don't know. It was good.

It was stupid. I mean, it was like stupid just like everything else at this place. I mean, like, it's just what you're looking for. You know, if it delivers on stupid. Yeah. It was dumb. Right. It was like free mason jars or another.

Or we paid for expensive drinks, but get to keep a jar. Well, you got a, you got a hurricane glass. That's what yours came with. Though that is not the drink that I had. It is a hurricane glass. Yes. That is correct. Yeah.

So future, when I make hurricanes at home, you got a class to put them in. So Mitch, you were, you came like I, like I mentioned earlier, you came pretty late. You were quite insistent via text message that we ordered the jumbo combo appetizer platter. Yeah. And was I wrong? You weren't wrong. I didn't think you stirred us wrong here.

So the jumbo combo appetizer platter. Sounds like a nice guy. Hey, I'm right. You know what? You should put in these apps while I'm on the road. Not a big deal. Here is everything that comes in the jumbo combo platter. Signature wings, onion rings, two pillow chicken tenders, spinach artichoke dip with parmesan

flatbread and bruschetta. And then it comes with three dip and sauces, honey mustard, hickory barbecue and blue cheese. And as far as our wing sauces, we got a choice between heavy metal, tangy barbecue and classic rock. And we ended up going with heavy metal. Evan Susser, friend of the podcast, Evan Susser was pretty insistent that we get that heavy metal sauce, which turned out to be their, their spiciest one. But our server, Elvis, we asked him like, how, how, how spicy is it?

And Elvis was like, nothing here is spicy to me. So, and he was right. This wasn't a particularly spicy wing sauce. It wasn't a, I'll say one of the best things about that is that that, about the entire place is that that wing sauce was good. The wings themselves were cold, but the, but the wing sauce was good. Also, Nick kind of went by this, but our server's name was Elvis. He actually was named Elvis.

And Nick asked him that. Yeah, I confirmed. And he said, and Nick said, oh, that's cool. And I said, thank you. Thank you very much. He did. Yeah, he did. He gave the whole, he, he gave us everything we, we kind of wanted to hear.

It was, you know what I liked is that, because we asked him about it, we asked him about his name and he gave a very, like interesting backstory about how he, his mom was a huge Elvis fan and named him after, after Elvis. And then also he, he confessed that he thinks it's the only reason he got hired there. Yes. His name was Elvis and they pretty much offered him a job on the spot. And then he spilled, then he spilled hot coffee on all of us. Yeah, I would say, I mean, the wings were cooked, but they were cold.

And that was like a big bummer to me. And also too, like, I think of the appetizers. All right, going through, going through the list of the various things. The wings were definitely cold. The onion rings, sparse. I feel like we got a half dozen onion rings. And kind of cold. Kind of cold as well.

The spinach artichoke dip, searing hot. It was like a big thing, a molten lava that was just sitting there. And like, I got a little bit of that. And it just, it burned my tongue on impact when I had a little bit of that, with that Parmesan, Parmesan flatbread, which was really just more of a chip with a Parmesan flavoring on it. Yeah, it didn't help that you tried to drink that as soon as you came out of the table. Oh, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine.

Yeah, I don't, the whole platter, I don't know. It was, sampler platters are fun, we were saying. Like, I think it's enjoyable, no matter the individual quality of the items. But yeah, it's true. They sort of, each one of them left something to be desired. Here's the other thing I think they did wrong with that jumbo combo. You're going to call it the jumbo combo. I'm like, okay, we're in for, this is going to be a lot of food, guys.

Get ready for it. Yep. We got three bruschettas, three chicken tenders. Like, give us at least four of everything. There are four people at this table. There are four people at this table. And also too, like a party of four ordering something called the jumbo combo. I feel like they're going to be like, oh, we're going to each get one of everything.

Instead of we're having a fucking saw bruschetta on a half on a share plate, just so we can all have a taste of it. I mean, it was just kind of disappointing for something that was just talking about its size in the name of the menu item. If this place is purportedly a barbecue Southwest restaurant, additionally to being a place where there is rock memorabilia, what a confusing theme in general. Yeah.

But then just the bruschetta, that is the only Italian-type item on an otherwise Southwest. Yeah. Kind of random. Yeah, so random. The menu doesn't have a ton of, it's like that guy who's building a golf course for his family, the mini golf course for his family, but doesn't know what he's doing. I'm like, yeah, there we go.

We got these bruschetta in onion rings and chicken fingers and artichoke dip. Okay. I don't know. But then also there's a big barbecue theme now. It was very strange, but I will say the bruschetta was actually, I thought maybe one of the better things on the plate. The guy doesn't know. He's just trying to keep Ringo Starr's ex-wife happy.

He's just trying to keep food on her table. It means well. The bruschetta, wing sauce, and maybe that's it as far. The tenders were fine, but nothing blew me away. But the sauce of the wing and the bruschetta were maybe the highlights of the whole thing for me, which I guess isn't really saying too much. Is that appetizer sampler platter ever a home run anywhere? Like is that ever like, oh, we're getting the sampler platter and we're going to have

a great time. I feel like it's always like, maybe it's just that jackall trades, master of none sort of thing where you're getting a little bit of everything and you're getting kind of the average of a half dozen different apps instead of just going after the one great app that this place can nail. You know what I mean? You feel like they're all rushed out and no care is really taken with any of the individual items.

Yeah. I would say this one is on, this was on the disappointing side of the spectrum. But then again, I wonder if these are ever all that great. I think they're always kind of, you know, just nothing particularly special. I'm in general feeling like we maybe, I think we walked out of there thinking, hey, that was all right. And I think in the drive, all of us sort of, it went down a notch or two. I'm soured on, especially since I'm starting to feel more and more sick from the food.

Right. I'm just like, ugh, I'm sweating and like, ugh. I think I might sound different. I think my tones are more dulcet because my throat is a little swollen. Maybe this food will not digest. Maybe I leave and vomit as soon as this is done. Yeah. When you're sitting around with like a group of four friends just like shooting the shit

and gabbing and having and poking fun at the decor and eating all this food, you know, it's kind of one thing. But then when you've got that drive from Hollywood over here to our studios in Burbank that like 20 minutes alone in your vehicle of just shame, you're just kind of like, Jesus. It kind of like after that, like kind of lets you process what you just went through a little bit. And yeah, I feel like that was maybe, that appetizer platter was maybe not as great. Well, it wasn't, we didn't even think it was great there.

But I think after some time has passed, it was probably more on the poor side. Yeah. It was not great. I mean, it also wasn't that bad though. I don't know. I was eating it. It wasn't terrible. Yeah, it's good.

It's fine. I think in general that even though I've never had a spectacular eating experience there, my intrigue with this place and my desire to walk into them, no matter what city I'm in, just maintains. Oh yeah. Like even though it has not portrayed my trust despite lots of boring meals over the years. I'd go back. I'd go back for sure.

We also had the other thing we ended up getting for the table. The table was a, what was it called? Was it just called the pretzels? Yeah, it was a German, a couple of German pretzels with German beer sauce and then kind of a spicy mustard. Perhaps an Oktoberfest. It was not. Yeah, they had a little Oktoberfest menu there.

And the pretzel was, I mean like, it wasn't the best pretzel any of us had. It obviously seemed like. We liked it at the time though. We were happy. We did. And now I think we're all in agreement that that was not. It was fine. It was fine.

It was maybe, but then that's being hard on super pretzels. I'm saying like a freezer super pretzel or something like that you bake at your house. I'm saying like it's a step above that. You're going to get a better one at Disneyland or at Auntie Ann's in the mall, I feel, than that pretzel. And those are cheap, so. Yes, no doubt you get a better one at Auntie Ann's, which we will review maybe at some point on Doe Boys.

Oh, of course. We'll hit them all up. Wetzel's Pretzels. Oh, if you do that in Cinnabon and just like all of these sort of limited mall dessert places. Oh, no, we go, this podcast is going to go these places. Oh, cool. Get ready.

Lots of pretzels in the dear throat. We've got at least five more episodes in us before we completely run out of chains. I can't wait to listen to you and Evan Susser's podcast before you go to Auntie Ann's. Yeah, the pretzel was, I think it was one of the things I enjoyed the most at the time, but yeah, I won't shit on it that bad. It was fine. I did like that cheddar beer sauce that came with it. Yes.

This is surprisingly like, this kind of has a nice flavor to it. And a lot of the beer flavor was kind of coming through. Also too, again, you know, the rock theme, you would think they would call their Oktoberfest promotion Rocktoberfest because why not, but no, it's just called Oktoberfest. Yeah, I don't know, whatever. No, no, no, I agree with you. Moving on to our... We would sue the shit out of them.

Moving on to our entrees. So, also on the Oktoberfest promotion, this was on their limited seasonal menu, they had the Oktoberfest Schnitzel Burger, which I ordered. I got that with Southwest Season Fries with Chipotle Ketchup. You can upgrade your fries, add some seasoning and a special sauce for an extra one dollar. I did not regret that. Those fries were fine. They were well seasoned.

They kind of had an interesting character to them. Chipotle Ketchup was fine. It also came with another little sauce side of that cheddar beer sauce, which I enjoyed. The Oktoberfest Schnitzel Burger was an odd sandwich that I ordered probably more out of grim curiosity than anything. It was like two pork cutlets that were breaded and fried, kind of like Schnitzel style. And then it had some of that mustard on top of that, some of that cheddar beer sauce there, some bacon strips, and it was all served on a pretzel roll.

Very, very heavy. I mean, just heavier than it sounds. It was just a very, very heavy sandwich. No, not just like literally heavy. Yeah, it was a physically heavy sandwich. It was a very, very heavy sandwich. It was crazy because you're like, you want to bite it? I was like, sure.

And then you gave it to me and my hand crashed through the table. Like that side of beef the Flintstones get. It was fucking gigantically big. And a little roll, because I thought, oh, should I ask for a bite as well? But then the roll had just slid away from the massive slab of meat to where I thought, there's no way a third person can pick this thing up. Yeah, yeah. It's becoming a sloppy endeavor.

It was kind of nasty looking, but I'm glad you got it. And the taste wasn't bad, I thought. I thought it was fine. It was just like, I was halfway finished and I was like, that was too much. I ate too much of this. I had so much of my burger left that the guy, and I usually will take something home, but I'm just like, I don't want any more of this. He was offering me a box and I was like, no thanks.

He was like, are you sure? Like really, there was enough of it left where he felt obligated to make sure I got some to go. But you're a local. You can take it to your refrigerator, not to some hotel room without a mini fridge. No, I decided to be wasteful because I just didn't want any more of it. It was just such an overwhelming. And I feel like it just wouldn't really keep well either. But I don't know, like an odd menu item.

It felt like, oh, why not just make more of a German concept burger instead of going all the way and eating this. I guess it's interesting that they took that leap, made that risk, but it was just very strange. Yeah, just very strange. It was weird that they tried it. Yeah. I had the Texan, which I'm now reading was 1,548 calories, by the way, and 7,772 grams of sodium. Is it grams of sodium?

I would say sodium, a massive element of everything. A lot of salt. The sampler platter, probably the drinks, say everything. Very salty. This was a choice hickory smoked pulled pork or chicken. I went with pulled pork with chipotle barbecue sauce, cheddar, and Monterey Jack cheese. Crispy fried jalapenos and onions, onion strings. It says onions, but it was onion strings.

Piled high on toasted brioche. And you can go big for a little extra, which puts it up into about 2,000 calories. I did not go big. I did not go big because... Stayed at the mere 1,500 calories. Yes. So I've had about 4,000 calories today, I guess. So I got mine with just seasoned fries, just the regular fries.

They were kind of plain. But they were good. I thought the fries were good. And I actually thought the sandwich wasn't too bad either. It wasn't great. It wasn't terrible. It was kind of like, oh yeah, this is a decent... This is a decent...

One of those sandwiches from one of these places was kind of what I was in my head. It wasn't done poorly. I remember I got a pulled pork from Carrows, which was the worst thing I've ever had in my life. And this was just kind of... It was done alright. And now that it's sitting with me and I am sweating and feel sick, I don't like it as much, but the seasoned fries were good.

The cowboy beans were kind of like nothing. They were a little too kind of like sweet. There was too much going on with the baked beans or the cowboy beans. Why are they even giving baked beans there? I guess it's like, oh, we've got some barbecue stuff. You're supposed to have beans with them, but it's just like, why do you have this? Yeah, that's another question about that. What's going on?

I don't understand. Is that... I would get if it was like Western country rock or something. And I'd be like, okay, whatever. You sold me. I'll eat these beans. Yeah. And then the last thing it came with was also coleslaw, what is it called?

Citrus coleslaw, which was not good. I don't think I wrote down the specific thing I had, but it was just kind of like the original signature burger. And there was some really cocky... The legend burger. Okay. Okay. Oh, thank you.

There was some really cocky quotes in the burger section of the menu about like, you know, when an artist just with raw talent and energy and nerve just creates, just gets inspiration and makes a masterpiece. Yeah. These are kind of like that. Just the sort of snotty attitude. Yeah, no one knows. What are you talking about?

Like, there's so few people know that. Like, you know what it's like when a rock comes up with a thing? It's like, no, we don't know that. We come to this place because we don't know that. We want to learn about rock music. Also reading that quote while like the scissors sisters is playing. Like, slamming the scissors sisters. But when I think of sort of, you know, maybe I think of, you know, Bob Dylan or Jimi Hendrix

or somebody just like, you know, forming a new genre just through sheer will and talent. Instead, you know, Uncle Cracker is on there or something. But so, yeah, then what came was just pretty plain. It actually really reminded me of Carl's Jr. in a good way. I really liked the Western bacon cheeseburger at Carl's Jr. That was a frequent thing for me growing up. That's good to know. Yeah, and this was similar because it was cheddar cheese and bacon

and maybe barbecue sauce and onion rings. But it may be still not as basically satisfying as Carl's Jr. thing because if you're going to Carl's, you know it's just going to be a big sloppy fuck pile. Yeah, sure. You were shoving into your mouth. You got a huge Carl's Defender over here and actually I think Nick too. I love Carl's Jr. So I will say that that burger was not as good as Carl's Jr. burgers.

Yeah, I wouldn't say so, which is crazy because... I didn't even taste it. No, you're right. You could tell by looking at it. You wouldn't be wrong, actually. And which Carl's Jr. are plentiful in Los Angeles and aren't in crowded tourist clusterfucks. So I not just go to any Carl's Jr.

And I also... I was kind of disappointed. Borderline offended by the fries, which were a special kind of fry referred to as Parmesan Romano fries. Just some weird melding. It's sort of a... What's the Parmesan Reggiano? It's sort of a weird perversion of that term.

And what it was was just regular fries with kind of the white powder tossed onto it haphazardly, often in the center of the fry rung. There was just too much powder to where I stayed on the outskirts where there was only mild powder because I knew I'd be overwhelmed by what was in the middle. Yeah, they didn't make any effort to put that in a bowl and roll it around and kind of get it thoroughly mixed. It was just sort of dumped on the top unceremoniously.

And it also just looked like that Kraft Parmesan powder or the packet powder you get with a pizza to go. Absolutely, but even drier, maybe. It felt so packety, which is... I think that's why I use the word offensive because a good Parmesan Rosemary fries, I think that's a great indulgence and I feel like there's excellent places in Los Angeles.

I'm thinking about them. It's a Mohawk Bend, a really great restaurant around here. And thinking about how masterfully those are done as opposed to just a bunch of powder on fries. Scott's such a nice guy. It's offensive to me that they just took a container of this stuff and poured it on your fries. Come on, hard job.

It's not fair. I feel like we might see... In the fries, we might see a microcosm of the issue with their menu because there are four different seasonings you can get to upgrade your fries and they're kind of all over the place and it seems like executed somewhat haphazardly and it's kind of like, what are you trying to do here?

Why not just figure out one thing that you do? Like just get one great fry seasoning that you do and that's just your fry seasoning. The fries come out this way with this sauce and that's how you get them and they're great. Instead of kind of like paralyzing us with all this choice and then some of these options are less than ideal, less than the default, except you're being upcharged to get them.

Right. This is another thing as opposed to comparing hard rock to Planet Hollywood which I think is pretty appropriate. Planet Hollywood, like even that had kind of like signature items. Sure. I feel like they got kind of famous for like, I think there was a Captain Crunch encrusted chicken which people kind of made fun of,

but at least you knew, if I go to Planet Hollywood with that kooky cereal chicken, the Hard Rock Cafe in all these decades has never identified a signature what they are good at. It sure ain't the fries. And now they're trying with like barbecue. It's really strange. There was not even a crispy chicken sandwich

which I thought was so strange. I was like, I can't get a crispy chicken sandwich or like a buffalo sandwich. Like they don't have this here. Because I feel like that's kind of like a staple at all those sorts of places where there was nothing like that on the menu. No, they don't.

But you can get like a club sandwich which was just sort of like, all right, I guess. You know, it's really weird. It's all over the place. And yeah, they need a signature item. They need like, oh yeah, but the Hard Rock Cafe has the awesome blossom or something. They just need like that one thing

that is going to drive people to go there. Just like fricking like fries shaped like a guitar. You're eating a bunch of little guitars. They're done. You can't get that anywhere else. Like bass of, that's the head of the guitar. There you go. I think that's gone away.

I think that sort of stuff is just fading away. Sadly, like rock itself. It's dying out. Well, that's somber note. Let's get to our final thoughts in the Hard Rock Cafe. So, Scott, you've heard the podcast before. Here's what we'll do.

We'll go around. We'll give sort of our summation of our opinions on this chain and then close it out by giving us your score on the order of one to five forks. Let's start with you, Scott. Well, I think this podcast has been a journey of discovery. I think that my youthful heart of flutter

on his first date opinions about the Hard Rock Cafe have given way in just this session to grim poor Parmesan fry. Just a puddle of disappointment. Maybe we'll all be like the giving tree where you'll go and sit in an empty Hard Rock one day, your journeys with it throughout the years, from a young boy to an old man.

I was just trying to help you out because it's ending on such a sad note. Just to find some meaning in this terrible... But you know, just to say something nice about it, my Niagara Falls visit, which was very enjoyable and much more brief and less of a big meal than what we had, I went in there for just regular fries

and a beer at 11 o'clock on a Niagara Falls night, and that was delightful. That was really fun, and I think that's what it's good for. It seems like a kind of place like, I got a snack and a shot of whiskey, and then I got out of there. As a place to have a full meal,

I'd say rather disappointing, and I'd find the vibe and the theme just kind of laughable at the end of the day and just sort of broad and generic, and I don't know, I was thinking it was more like three, but I might have to bump it down to two and a half, two and a half, two with a couple of Matt Selman tines. Just to be nice, I'll add a couple of those little guys.

All right. Mitch, go ahead. You know, when I walked in there, Ruby Soho was playing, and I was like, okay, cool, and then I was like, oh yeah, this song is like 30 plus, 30 years old, or whatever, 30 plus years old. I don't think it's that old.

Is it Ruby Soho? It's Rancid, right? It's a Rancid song. I think it's from 30 years ago. Yeah, oh no, it's newer than that, oh whatever. It's where you can hear old classic Rancid. Then 30 years ago was 1985. I don't know, fine, it wasn't 30 years ago.

God. Back to the future was at the top of the box office, and Rancid was blaring from our jukeboxes. Ronald Reagan was in the middle of his presidency, and Rancid was blowing up the airwaves. Often quoted Rancid in speeches to appeal to young voters. Attention Americans, I just want to say I'm enjoying this new Rancid album.

God damn it. The second presidential impersonation. Bused out of Ford next time? Whoa. That's pretty good. I just think it's dumb. I just think it, I mean like, I am a guy who loves rock and roll.

Pink Floyd is my favorite band. I used to love Zeppelin. I also like Dave Matthews' band, and everyone makes fun of me. They weren't playing any of them in there. Not even cool enough for playing Dave Matthews. There was LMFAO sort of music going on. It's such a weird time with music

and where on earth this world is going, where who knows where it is, what culture will be in 100 years, and rock will be this weird thing that doesn't even exist anymore. You know, I went in there, I met some good friends. My meal wasn't that bad. That's the thing to me,

for a place that doesn't really have, it feels like they don't know what they want to be or where they're going. I was like, oh, the food should be way worse, but it's not terrible, terrible. No, no. It's just nothing great. I like the drink selections.

I love that they had a bunch of weird different drinks, and I actually liked my drink. But we've done, this is the third one of these restaurants. They're all starting to blend together to me. I'm like, this is fucking stupid. Rocktoberfest is a failure. I got to give it a similar thing, and I actually, see, I feel bad giving it three forks,

because I think it should be worse than three forks. But then I'm also like, well, Cabo Wabo Cantina needs to be less forks as well. Don't amend your review again. You've already amended your Cabo Wabo review once. You know what? I'm throwing out the napkin.

Cabo Wabo is now a two and a half fork. Oh, fuck you. No way. Poor Cabo Wabo. But what happens to Hard Rock? Margaritaville is now a three fork review, and Hard Rock Cafe is two and a half forks. You've just like basically,

this is the equivalent of when there's like a season premiere that erases an entire previous season. You've given people like reason to ignore the back catalog of dough boys and just take it from this point forward where you're just changing all the rules. Well, good start at this episode. It's fucking great.

There's no rhyme and reason to this fucking dumb show. I say change them. All any take keeps us on our toes. It opens up old cases. Yeah. So the old episodes are fresh and alive and not locked in a tomb. So what is your review for Hard Rock Cafe then?

It's two and a half forks. Two and a half forks. Two and a half forks. Come on. I mean like what's going on here? Why? Why does it even mean it's so dumb? There's no reason to be nice.

Yeah. Why am I holding this brand aloft? It's owned by the Seminole tribe. It's a bunch of Ringo Starr's wife's husband. Like why am I being sympathetic to these people? This food should be better. This should... You're 100% right.

And I'm just like as Rock Dobra goes on next week they're going to be fucking all one forks. I'm sick of this shit. All right. Yeah. You know, rock music was at a time like super edgy and this was like a cultural flash point. You know, adults were getting mad at kids

for listening to rock music. Turn that music down. That was like... If it's... I remember KNAC, the hard rock station when I was a kid was if it's too loud, you're too old. And now it's gotten to a point where all these people who grew up listening to rock are, you know,

I don't know, they're of the age when you would manage a chain restaurant. And rock has gotten so safe and so irrelevant. And I feel like that's what I feel at the hard rock cafe of just like, oh, this is kind of a very safe experience. This is kind of a time capsule that's maybe like, you know, reflecting when this... Trying to capture when this was something

that was more in the public consciousness, but now it all just kind of feels kind of tired and irrelevant. And you know, when they've got like Lord playing on the TV, it's like, well, okay, but that's not rock music. That's just contemporary music that you're trying to sort of graft onto this hard rock concept that you've committed to.

That's your worldwide brand and presence. And their notion of what rock is, I find sort of lame and laughable and not really... It's ill-defined. And you know, one thing in the Niagara Falls location sprawled really big on a wall. It said, welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends, Emerson, Lake and Palmer.

Like, who looks at that and kind of like, you know, salutes it or puts their hand on their heart? Yeah, exactly. You said it, brother. You said it, restaurant. It's kind of like... It's more sort of a... It's like all American music is kind of the concept.

And to me, that's just sort of like, all right, I get it, but this sort of broad Americana, it's just like uninteresting. This decor doesn't really do anything for me. The service was fine. Elvis was very nice. The gentleman who brought our food to the table and complimented Mitch on his Patriots hat was very nice.

Everyone is very affable. The server, the host was great. The person who validated our parking was very pleasant. But I feel like all the service was a little slow. And it might have just been they were, you know, they just had too much going on. They had too much business for the amount of staff that they had, but it was a little slow.

We crawled through our meal. The food, just subpar. I don't know. Overall, I'm just like, I don't... I agree with your assessment, Scott. This is a place where if you want to observe the novelty of it, sit at the bar, get yourself a well-drink or a beer, and observe the memorabilia.

Take in kind of the campiness. Don't subject yourself to the food. Two forks for Hard Rock Cafe. And let me say this, Mitch. What the fuck? You keep amending your scores and saying that Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville or Sammy Hagar's Cabo Abo Cantina are worse. Those at least have a personality.

Those have... This is Sammy Hagar's restaurant. This is Jimmy Buffett's like, I'm getting... Oh, this is this party animals restaurant. This is this lounge lizards restaurant. Like, I'm kind of getting their character and their personality through it. It's interjected in their menu. It's interjected in the vibe and the atmosphere.

I would much rather have that specificity, that personality, over kind of the generic blob that is Hard Rock Cafe. Give me Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville. Give me the Cabo Abo Cantina. Don't give me your bullshit of amending your scores and saying that the previously established Canon of Doe Boys is out the window based on your arbitrary whims. Don't fucking make a commitment.

Here's a new statement. Rocktoberfest is fucking over. No episode next week. No more fucking Rocktoberfest. Can I say really fast also? Oh, if you're defending yourself, though. No, no, no. Somebody cares just before we...

But just really quick, I wanted to acknowledge that in addition to the restaurant and the hotels in the casino, they're also, for a brief period of time, was a Hard Rock theme park called Hard Rock Park, which was in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. This place... I'm kind of as kind of a theme park nerd. I was kind of checking, like, oh, there's construction photos of it.

Oh, it's about to open. It's almost open. Oh, it's closed. It was open for four months. What a disaster. And I think that kind of speaks to, if you're going to Disneyland, you're going to see the Disney characters. If you're going to Universal Studios, I guess you know you're going to see movie characters in general,

or how movies are made. If you are going to Hard Rock, what do you get? What do you think you're getting there? And specifically what they had, though, they had something called Led Zeppelin the Ride. And I love that a place that had Led Zeppelin the Ride is now just rusting so that it's gone dead.

And my favorite thing is that they had a psychedelic blacklight ride based on the song Nights in White Satin. That sounds fun. It is well-reviewed. And you can watch ride-throughs on YouTube. And you put on 3D glasses, not 3D glasses, but just prism glasses that made everything look all trippy. So it was kind of designed maybe to,

we're not going to say you should take drugs on it, but if you do, we'll look the other way. Though probably you'd get thrown out of the park right away. But yeah, open for four months and now dead and gone. That's amazing. I have just a couple of quick things to say. One, you've never sounded older than when you said, and Lord is on the TV.

And didn't I say a joke to that Patriots fan about the restaurant kind of being bad or something and he laughed? I was trying to think of what it was. I don't remember. Because then I was also like, oh, that's a sign that the employees are also laughing at this place and don't care,

even though Elvis seemed kind of chipper and up to things. And then finally just, it's sad. I like rock and roll. Is it dead? Is it dying? Hard rock feels like it's on its way. It should be on its way out, but success is still happening.

Still going strong. Strange. The Hard Rock FA, I feel like, is the restaurant equivalent of Rolling Stone magazine. Yeah. Whereas this was once kind of like, it's representing something that was cool and casual and revolutionary and now just like,

it's some dopey guys in sport coats. Yeah. I give Rolling Stone magazine one fork, I think. Yeah. Yeah. All right. That'll do it for our discussion of Hard Rock Cafe and this week's edition of Rocktoberfest.

Next week we'll be back with more Rocktoberfest, despite the objections of Mike Mitchell. Sorry. It's time for a new segment. We have a fast food item that we bought yesterday, and we're going to test how it held up after spending a night in the fridge. These are the leftovers.

My understanding is this is the theme to the HBO show, The Leftovers. This is the most popular HBO show. Oh, I'm a little creeped out. All right. That music and now a ghost is being exhumed from a red lunch pail. All right.

So I bought these last night. So it's very funny when I said, oh, that's a good thing. You like Carl's Jr. Because it is a good thing. Oh. I went to Carl's Jr. last night and believe it or not, I bought three Western bacon cheeseburgers. Oh, my God.

Wow. So, which was kind of a bad move by me to get what I got at dinner time because it's very similar and you got something similar, too. I normally, this would make me in any other night than tonight and right now, I'd be so happy to have a free Western bacon cheeseburger in front of me. This seems, but at this moment, dear God,

and that it's a day old. This was, you guys talked about how to fuck with Gardner, right? It's been a full night in Mike Mitchell and Jack Allison's fridge, which... No, no. I think there's just open meat in that. So, yes, I bought these at Carl's Jr. last night,

three of these bad boys, put them in the fridge. They were still hot when I put them in the fridge. This was about at 9 p.m. last night. Took them out this morning, put them in this cooler bag, brought them to work, put them in the fridge at work, and then I went and got them after we were at Hard Rock Cafe. So, these things, they've been refrigerated. They're good to go.

They've been out now for about, well, since we've been doing the podcast, which has been like three hours. Oh, man. And here we go. Everyone gets a Western bacon cheeseburger. What if I... Nice toss there.

I feel like I shouldn't have caught it. I will say the first thing I notice is that they're hard. Yeah, this is like the texture of the bread is very, it feels very stiff and stale. Oh, boy. Yeah, this bun is in bad shape. The bun is upsetting. The bun, really, I mean,

I think it might have to do with being refrigerated. It feels like it got pretty hard. And smells very, I don't know, what is this? It's just sort of musty. It smells musty and bacon-y. It's kind of a combo. You smell that bacon big time. So this is a cheeseburger that...

It's a beef patty, cheese, bacon, barbecue sauce, and onion rings. So... It's what I had. It's basically what I had. It's what Scott ordered. Oh, my God. It kind of smells like a musty.

It smells like when you smell a burger bun bag, which I guess only I do. Oh, you're right. It does smell like a burger bun bag. It just smells kind of old. You don't... That smell is strange. And then a strong smell of bacon.

But everyone, for those who don't like the sounds of people eating, turn away right now. Yeah, the texture of the meat looks a little suspect, too, just having set out there. Let me take a bite of this. And then they all died. Hmm. Hmm.

It seems to have dried out a lot. Yeah. I guess the moisture of the patty has kind of gone away. Scott looks sick. The only saving grace here is that, as I mentioned, I love these and I ate them all the time. Like, when I learned to drive, this is why after... If I had a shitty day at high school, which was always...

I would like, well, I'll choke one of these Western bacon cheeseburgers down and feel better. Yeah. And so it's at least giving me a sense memory. But if I had no previous experience with these, this would be sort of nightmarish. Well, this is kind of tough. You can really tell, like, the low quality of the meat.

Like, that's really coming through right now, because of how dry it is. I was gonna say, though, there's still a smoky flavor to the meat. Was it kind of like... Sorry. To me, it kind of just feels like kind of crumbly and... Man, this is hard to do. Yeah.

Every element of it feels the same. Like, the texture of the bun and cheese and meat are all about equal. Um... It's so hard to eat. Holy shit. Well, here's the thing about this test. If you were gonna do this...

I guess we're imagining a nightmare scenario where you don't have access to any sort of reheating equipment. Could it really give you a plop this bad boy in the microwave for 90 seconds? It might bring it back to life. Just a little bit. But maybe the microwave makes it just soggy and wet. That's true.

That could happen as well. I feel like so much of the sauce, the barbecue sauce, has just been absorbed into the texture of the bun. Yeah, you can't really taste it. It's very hard to separate. Like, if you wanted to get the bacon off of the cheese, off of the meat, this would be impossible because they have been fused by time.

It's hard. I want to get every ingredient, but I can't. I'm almost eating half this burger. Me too. I can't do more of it. Yeah, I'm probably going in for another bite. I've already eaten half of it. And this burger, as it's said in its basic form,

I think is an excellent burger, but... Yeah, this is one of my favorites from Carl's Jr. I don't know. We didn't settle on what the outcome of this segment is. We just were like, let's just get something left over. It's either we're going to bring it back or it's left behind. Okay.

Is that what happens on the show? I don't watch that show. Yeah, I'm sure that's what happens on the show. That's close enough to what happens on the show. I'm going to say this might be good if I'm hungover, but I don't know. I'd rather just go get a hot breakfast sandwich left behind. Yeah.

I'd vote the same. You know what occurred to me? Maybe a toaster oven. Maybe gets you some sort of crispy... Toaster oven might be good, yeah. Maybe a crispifies it again. That being said, I don't think anybody's keeping this burger around for a day and is really skilled with a toaster oven.

These qualities of a food eater are probably negating each other. You know, and this will be something we take into consideration. Maybe we should give it a little nuke next time, see how that goes. Because if you nuke to this thing for 20 seconds, it might be okay again. I still don't think it's going to be that great. I'm going to leave it behind, too. But I also think that it doesn't speak to how good Carl's Jr. is. I think that having a cold burger is really hard.

Eating a leftover burger, it's hard to have a really great one. Yeah. If I'm getting a burger pizza, sure. A lot of people can eat it cold. If I heat up pizza again, I'm good with it. But if I have a day-old burger and you nuke it up and you're like, this just wasn't what it was yesterday, come on. How often do you find yourself in that situation, too,

where you have an entire burger intact? Yeah. It's pretty rare, yeah. Especially one that went into the fridge hot. Yeah. And fries, dear God, microwaved fries are one of the worst, among the worst food items, I would say. You know what I'd say?

I'd fry those up in a pan. Put a little bit of oil, heat it up in the pan, get a little bit of crispiness, add a little bit of salt, then bring it back to life. It's something you really got to give it to pizza on this level. Yeah. Hand for pizza, please, because yeah, pretty great, even if you don't heat it up.

Really great if you do. Really great if you put it back in the oven. Yeah, pizza bounces back. Fries, burgers, not so much. I'll give a little shout-out to fried chicken as well. Sure. Fried chicken holds up on the fridge. A lot of people like cold fried chicken.

Yeah, it's real good. So everyone, is that three left behinds? That would be three left behinds. Three left behinds. All right. Three left over behind did. Doesn't make that phrase worse. That was the leftovers.

I'm laughing and... There it is. Just as popular as the Cheers theme. It makes me think of all of those, the haunting memories each week, with each leftover getting further and further I assume from the music. I think it's kind of scary, yeah. I'm kind of grim.

I feel like I'm picturing a knight's armor when that's on the screen. It's leaning at me. Oh, God. That'll do it for the first edition of the leftovers. Just like a restaurant, we value your feedback. Let's open up the feedback. Today's email comes to us from Charles Vistol.

Charles writes, One of my favorite things about going to a fast food joint is open season on the soda phone. This means you not only get unlimited at your own pace refills, but can do the ultimate pay of combining sodas and what I grew up calling a suicide. Did you call it something else? I'd love to.

Regardless, what's your jam for your single cup soda combo? I usually do half diet coke, a quarter root beer, a quarter-owned soda, and a lemon slice. Life's good. That was orange soda that kind of muttered there. Quarter-owned soda, orange soda, and a lemon slice. Life's good.

Thank you, Charles, for the email. Sorry, I stumbled through that a little bit. What are you guys' feelings on suicides, combining a bunch of sodas? And did you have a name for it other than suicides? I think it was called suicides, which is kind of like the implication being that you drank all these, and it would kill you or something.

Yeah, yeah. That's kind of stupid. I like the idea that somebody would take a bunch of pills that would kill you and then chase it down with Dr. Pepper mixed with ice tea. I'm wondering if there's another name for that. Tweet at us. Tweet at us.

At Doe Boys, hashtag suicide. And let us know if there's another word for that. Maybe don't use the hashtag suicide. No. Fine. Unless you're unrelatedly telling Nick or Mitch to kill themselves, hashtag burger boy hashtag suicide. I'm just worried about the hashtag suicide already being

used for people who are reaching out for help. Then use hashtag burger boy and hashtag suicide. Here's the thing, you can search just one hashtag. All right, fine. Hashtag I wish burger boy would commit suicide. That leaves about 20 more characters. And you know what? In those 20 characters, tell us what they were called

for your city or your town or something like that. Better not have been more than 20 characters. We don't want to hear it. Man, my mouth is still sore from chewing that. That burger was very gummy. Really? Texturally, it was really unpleasant. You know, they were definitely called suicides where I was

growing up in Lakewood. We would go to the AMPM and I might go to, I would get that 32 ounce cup, their version of the big gulp. And I would just get some of every fucking drink. I would just go down the line and get a little everything, fill that cup up. And I just like this weird sort of like off orange mixture it would be.

They kind of had like a little bit of carbonation, but also kind of like was kind of cut with the sweetness of like a lemonade and an orange drink and everything. And yeah, just getting all those flavors at once. I don't know. I would never do it as an adult, but as a kid, I like to get just like a little bit of everything. I will say that I never did suicides.

I always thought the kids who did suicides were kind of weirdo kids like Weigerberg, Burger Boy. But this guy, what's his name? Charles? Yeah. He seems like a nice guy, but his combo was especially strange that like he put Diet Coke within the drink, which is weird to me, I guess.

But you know what? People like the taste of Diet Coke. That's a funny thing to me. Like I drink Diet Coke because that's the one that has zero calories and it's not good for you by any means, but it's better than having regular Coke. I love regular Coke way more. But if you're going to mix them all up,

why bother with a diet? Maybe it's just that he likes that kind of a saccharin or whatever that fake sugar taste is. It's weird because having never, I kind of drank Coke and then just stopped drinking sodas all together and never had a diet phase. And so the couple times I've tried Diet Coke, I find it very weird.

It seems so chemically and yeah, very odd. So I never really did suicides. Same with Slurpees. Slurpees were maybe the ones that I would do like half and half, but not even really. I was pretty much like, all right, I'm going to get like a cherry Slurpee and I'm going to get a Coke or I'm going to get an orange drink.

Like an orange soda at a soda fountain is always fun or a Coke spray. I'm not usually going too crazy at the soda fountain. I want that classic taste. Yeah, sure. I would do, this takes me back to Carl's Jr. days to go back to a theme. The West Hills Carl's Jr. off a plat.

It's a good one. But yeah, I feel like I would do, I was mainly a root beer guy, but I'd do a little Coke helper. Oh, that's nice. So I think it would be, I would do like half root beer, quarter Coke, then just shift them back and forth, back and forth, the drop of each until they were seamlessly blended, which certainly they wouldn't be

unless they did it in that formula. But someone in line yelled at you first, taking way too long. Hey, idiot. Hey, lady. Very long hair in high school. Very effeminate. But I, the term suicide, suicide makes me think

more of like combining all of the condiments into kind of a weird gross pile. Oh, interesting. That's what I thought suicides were, but mixing a soda to your delight, that's a good thing. I think I might have just, I think I may have called it like the ultimate kick-ass drink. I think I called it something stupid and ironic.

Suicide makes no sense to me, because that's a good thing. It's like mixing drinks today. It's a pleasant thing. Do you know what I just realized? I think some kids might have called it like a free-for-all or something. Oh, interesting. Back from where I was from.

I never, if I want to slurpee or, you know, I just, I like the plain flavor, so I'm not on board with mixing it all up. It makes me almost feel bad, because you just get like this chemical sugar sludge. You get the syrup of what makes all those, and I don't want that. It's like mixing paint.

If you do too many, you just end up with a murky sludge. Exactly. You got to be careful. I guess suicide is an appropriate name. Yeah. You know, the warning should be implicit. Yeah, keep it simple, I feel like. Don't, you know, don't go nuts with these.

You know, model it off the ultimate suicide, the Arnold Palmer, which is a half iced tea, half lemonade. How simple is that? How great is that? I can get behind that one. That's true. Or the, from the recent ads, the Kevin Nealon. You've seen those commercials.

Oh, yeah, yeah. He's having lunch with the Arnold Palmer. Make mine a Kevin Nealon. That kind of sits there with too much pause as if you're supposed to be laughing uproariously. Very bizarre ads. And why are they having lunch? Yeah, once you settle on that part of your career

when you're just doing pharmaceutical ads for probably an ungodly amount of money, you just got to be in a weird place. I mean, that's like the career arc, that's like the equivalent of where Hard Rock Cafe kind of is. Just kind of on that point of like, well, we're just kind of cashing in now. I like both of those guys.

I'm going to order a Kevin Nealon next time I'm at a restaurant. See how many restaurants it takes before somebody, although probably they just go like, I don't know, Dr. Pepper and Coke and Feisty. If you have a question or comment about the world of chain restaurants, you can email us at dowboyspodcast at gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter at dowboyspod.

Check out our Facebook fan page, just dowboys. Scott Gerdner, thank you so much for joining us. A real treat. Thank you for having me. This is great. Moonbeam City is on Comedy Central. Anything you would like to plug? Just that.

I believe since this will be going up, presumably, in Rock D'Ober, we're still on for a bunch more episodes. 10.30 Wednesdays Comedy Central after South Park. And in fact, chain restaurants are kind of a fascination of the show. It kind of based on one thing I didn't mention about the Hard Rock Cafe. Rob Lowe, I know, was very fond of the Hard Rock Cafe

in the 80s. I think it was actually a cool hangout spot for the brat pack. That's where they went and got drunk and debaucherous at their height. I think it's where the term brat pack was coined, actually. And in Rob Lowe's autobiography, he says how he moved to a particular apartment because of its proximity to the Hard Rock Cafe.

That's insane. I should have said that at the top of the show. At one point, it was the cool spot in Los Angeles for cool actors to hang out and meet scores and scores of women. Makes sense. It makes sense, yeah. Sure, absolutely.

Yeah, yeah. But Rob Lowe's the main voice on the show. And sort of based on that, there's a lot of... I've made him sort of fascinated with weird chain restaurants. We had a place called Trapizios, which was a flying trapeze-themed restaurant in which all of the waiters and waitresses are on flying trapeze.

And then we have one coming up called a cop-themed restaurant called A Restaurant, which is just a pretty patience-trying list of cop-themed menu items, cop getty and meat bullets, and APB and J. Lee. Like, yeah, yeah. I think more, definitely way, way more thought out

than what Hard Rock is, if you ask me. Those restaurants should be real... Disappointed I was. Just give me a day with that menu. I'll turn it around. Puns galore. Yeah, yeah. Definitely check out the show,

and also kind of funny that... because I feel like there's a very... I mean, there's an ADs theme to the show, and it fits into Rocktoberfest very well. Well, and also to bring up a recurring theme, the episode that aired last night, as well as the main character voiced by Rob Lowe, falls in love with a dolphin,

which I feel like might be up your alley. I watched that episode, and it was hard for me to watch for that reason, specifically. What did he think? This was funny. If you're curious about that, listen to the previous Rocktoberfest episodes where Mitch gets some detail about his experiences

with some dolphins on vacation, but don't listen to his reviews because he just arbitrarily changes later on, so you can't trust those. They're like the missing minutes of the watergate. Yeah. Tapes. No longer. Disappeared. Or just don't listen to any of Rocktoberfest,

and let's all pretend it never happened. That'll do it for this episode of Doe Boys. For Mike Mitchell, The Spoon Bad, I'm Dick Weigher. Until next time, happy eating. See ya.