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The Country Star restaurant on the Universal CityWalk is owned by a number of country music superstars, including Vince Gill, Wynonna Judd, Reba McEntire, and TV hosts Lorianne Crook & Charlie Chase. The place is Country-gone-Hollywood, as bright & glitzy as its celebrity owners, with as much high-tech polish as anything inside the gates of the adjacent Universal Studios Hollywood theme park.
A little farther back is a bar area when you'll find touch-screen computer monitors matched with glass display cases. The glass cases exhibit clothes worn by Reba, Wynonna, and Vince; touch the monitor screen and you can choose between a reading a biography of the star, listening to an interview, or watching the music video (where the star wore the very clothes on display). Inside the main 525-seat dining room, a non-stop barrage of country-western music fills the air. The color scheme tends to dark reds and brown marble walls, with lots of pillars (some of the pillars are made to resembled the tops of giant, silver cowboy boots). There is a large mural of Nashville on the wall over the stage, and the entire restaurant is loaded with music memorabilia, making it a virtual shrine to country & western legends.
They don't miss a trick here. Even the menus are glitzy: an electronic logo of a shooting star twinkles across the top of the inside page when you open the menu - if the battery hasn't worn out (the menus are on sale at the gift shop for $15 if you get the urge to take one home). The food is old-fashioned Americana: BBQ chicken, various types of BBQ ribs, honey-roasted ham, Black Angus steaks, pizza, salads, and a very good chili. Most entrees are around $11.99, although there are less expensive choices. A sampler called "the Country Star Barbecue Feast" ($15.95) offers a huge platter of just about everything on the menu. If you like celebrity names to go with your entrees, there's also "Reba McEntire's Garden Vegetable Pasta," "Wynonna's Hickory-Smoked Chicken," and the "Vince Gill Cheeseburger." The food won't win any prizes, but there's plenty of it, and anyway, the ribs play second fiddle to the show here. An average meal for two will set you back about $35. But at its heart, Country Star is more Hollywood than Dogpatch. You'll find no faux haystacks or sawdust on the floor here, and the staff (and most of the customers) are strictly city-slickers (my waiter was a young, flamingly gay urbanite). What you have is basically a Planet Hollywood with a country-western veneer - but it's still a lot of fun. Which is apparently just how a lot of country stars like it - the manager boasts that over 70 stars have already passed through the doors of Country Star Hollywood. (The Academy of Country Music hosts its annual post-awards party at CSH.) The restaurant's grand opening was attended not only by the three the three main celebrity investors, but also by Loretta Lynn, Charlie Pride, Hoyt Axton, Diamond Rio, Wayne Gretzky, Little Richard and many more. The restaurant is open Mon-Thur from 11:30 AM to 11 PM; Fri-Sat from 11:30 AM to 12 midnight; and Sunday from 10:30 AM to 11 PM. [Update: Recently, the Country Star chain hit on hard economic times. The price of their stock plummeted, and all of their other restaurants closed - only this original CityWalk venue remains open. But crowds are getting thin here, and I've been receiving complaints about the service, food and cleanliness at the restaurant. It looks like cost-cutting is hurting the dining experience there.]
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