Kyoto Sushi & Grill at UCF

Kyoto Sushi & Grill is one of the newer restaurants to open in the shops surrounding the UCF Arena in Orlando. It is a semi-fast food restaurant, where you order your food with a cashier, and then the food is brought out to your table.

I ate here once previously for lunch and had a California Roll. On my second visit, this time for dinner, I had the Hibachi Chicken. Miso soup and salad were served first. The soup was good and the salad had the typical ginger dressing that everyone loves.

Soon enough, the main course, a huge plate of chicken, vegetables, rice, and noodles was served. It was mostly good. The chicken was tasty, but I found a bit too much of it to be fatty. They offered an upgrade to all white meat, and I should have gone for it. Regardless, I shouldn't need to be spitting out an unedible bit every few bites. Rice and vegetables were good, although they were a bit stingy with them. Looking at the picture below, it's hard to even spot the vegetables on the plate, and they are one of my favorite parts of the meal! The menu stated the chicken was served with soba noodles, but instead, we got the typical Japanese Steakhouse noodles. Still good, but not soba...

Besides the unedible chicken bits, I liked Kyoto. The food is mostly tasty, the prices are pretty reasonable (especially for lunch), and the portions are quite large. I think next time I'll either try a bento box or the hibachi shrimp.

Downtown Disney's Planet Hollywood

I ate at Planet Hollywood in Downtown Disney on January 30, 2008. The restaurant at Walt Disney World is the biggest Planet Hollywood that I've seen. Compared to the Planet Hollywood in Myrtle Beach, this restaurant is humongous. The whole restaurant is housed inside of a giant 5-floored globe filled with tables and lots of movie props. Not only is this Planet Hollywood larger than Myrtle Beach's restaurant, it also has a larger menu, and everything costs a few dollars more.

My meal was started with an appetizer of Chicken Crunch. It was basically fried chicken strips dipped into a sweet batter. Sweet and chicken don't go together in my opinion.

For the main course, I had the Garlic Shrimp. This consisted of soba noodles topped with shrimp, sugar snap peas, onions, peppers, garlic, and ginger in a slightly spicy sauce. I liked it, but at a price of $19.99, I didn't feel it was the best value for the food given. A few hours after I ate the meal was a problem though. Something in the Garlic Shrimp caused me to repeatedly burp out a horrible smell that reminded me of salami, meatballs, and Pepsi, all combined into one foul smelling gas. Beware...


After eating, I took the steps down from my 5th floor table and looked at some of the movie props. Before heading downstairs, this was my view from where I sat:

And here are some of the movie props I took pictures of. Here's a witch from Hocus Pocus:

Woody from Toy Story:

A giant moth from the original Dr. Dolittle:

A robot from some science fiction movie that I don't recognize:

One of the buildings from The Nightmare Before Christmas. Much of the sets and puppets from this movie used to be on display at MGM Studios. Rumor is that when Disney decided to update their exhibit, a few of their minimum wage employees got very lucky when they found a slew of Jack Skeleton puppets and most of Halloweentown in a dumpster somewhere on Disney property. Imagine what that stuff would go for on ebay...

And then there was this saw blade from a David Copperfield TV Special:


And finally, in the pond outside of Planet Hollywood was The Jenny from Forrest Gump: