This 1990s Burger Chain Totally Vanished By The Early 2000s

The 1990s didn't just give us theme restaurants — they gave us entire dining universes built around celebrities, memorabilia, and spectacle. The All Star Café was one of the loudest examples, a vintage burger chain that failed to make it nationwide even though it launched with talent that practically lived under stadium lights. It rose fast, spread quickly, and then — by the early 2000s — was mostly gone.

What made it such a big deal at the time was the playbook behind it. Instead of rock-and-roll nostalgia, this version leaned hard into sports stardom, turning rooms lined with TVs and memorabilia into the main event. Its Times Square opening in 1995 set the tone: Booths shaped like giant baseball gloves, athlete-owners loaning out personal gear, and enough screens to make it feel like a pregame show that happened to serve burgers and wings. 

Disney took the idea and ran with it, opening a massive All Star Café at the Wide World of Sports complex in 1998. High ceilings, themed seating, trivia on loop, and rows of TVs made it feel like a sports bar on a theme-park scale — a setup that suggested the chain was gearing up for a long, confident run. For a moment, it genuinely looked like that might happen.

The All Star Café's momentum didn't vanish overnight — it just slowed until the whole concept started losing its spark. The chain grew out of Robert Earl's larger ambition to turn dining into full-blown entertainment, the same instinct that shaped his early success with Hard Rock Café and later Planet Hollywood — founded by Bruce Willis and Sylvester Stallone. By the time he turned his attention to sports bars, Earl was chasing spectacle on an even bigger scale: Massive dining rooms, walls packed with screens, and athlete-owners like Shaquille O'Neal and Ken Griffey Jr. lending the idea instant credibility. It all worked when the hype was fresh, but as the novelty faded, the cracks became harder to miss. By the late '90s, the chain's revenue slid hard enough that loan payments started getting missed, and the same star athletes who helped launch the concept began distancing themselves.

Disney wound up being the last location, keeping any version of the name in circulation. When it took over the Wide World of Sports location in 2000, the All Star Café branding didn't stick around long. The restaurant reopened under new names — first What's Next Café and later the ESPN Wide World of Sports Grill — each one shifting the space further from the original concept. Disney kept the big, open layout and the walls of screens, turning the space into more of a general-purpose sports hangout than the branded concept it started as. But with every rebrand, the All Star Café moved further into the background.

By the time the building finally closed in 2007, the restaurant had already become a chain that fell off the map — one you might not have even known was gone until someone brought it up long after the fact.