RESTAURANTS : ROCK AND HARD PLACES : Now Orange County-ites Can Sustain Ear Damage at Two Trendy Burger Joints

It’s a continuing phenomenon--fast food served with all the overwhelming noise and crowding and visual assault of a rock concert. Speak up, I can’t hear you , I was saying . I guess it’s what we used to call “sensory overload” back in the ‘60s.

The first place we saw it was the Hard Rock cafes, but that was in the ‘70s and ‘80s when music was the metaphor. Now that movies have resurfaced as the big celebrity source, we have a new chain called Planet Hollywood, which has opened its first California branch in Orange County.

In the imposing South Coast Plaza shopping center, north of the main mall, we wait an hour and a half for a table on a Thursday night. Trying to get in to Planet Hollywood is like trying to convince somebody you have a backstage pass; waiting for your table is like waiting for the millennium. All Orange County seems to be here, a sea of gawkers drifting through the uproar.

From time to time, screens drop down from the ceiling to show random movie clips of mayhem or people eating, rock-video style. There’s a souvenir shop. Lucite cases display Rocky’s boxing shorts and the Arnold Schwarzenegger cyborg from “Terminator II: Judgment Day.” One room re-creates the command deck of the Starship Enterprise, complete with cosmic views. Hey, that was our party’s name on that squawky, almost inaudible speaker system! We can sit down!

The menu is somewhat more ambitious than you’d expect for a teen-age hangout. It includes good blackened shrimp with a whole-seed mustard sauce and excellent Texas nachos (deep-fried pizza dough brushed with barbecue sauce and topped with grilled onions, smoked chicken and cheese)--in effect, six particularly light quesadillas. And the baked Italian sandwich isn’t bad: more or less a hero in focaccia bread, warmed in the oven. Most things come with good, crisp half-sour pickles.

The rest of the selection ranges from OK burgers (served in poppy-seed Kaiser rolls) and decent Buffalo wings to overdone calamari with the texture of little breaded rubber bands. Some of the offerings sound appealingly offbeat, but chicken breaded in Cap’n Crunch cereal is just breaded chicken, and the blackened shrimp and andouille sausage on the Creole pizza are undetectable in a mass of cheese. For some reason, the pizzas are served on a tile that ensures that they come lukewarm.

The desserts are soda-fountain blowout stuff: a Snickers chocolate pie with caramel sauce, whipped cream and chopped nuts; an Oreo mousse pie (available on special)--predictably, a mousse pie with crumbled cookies and white chocolate ice cream.

Meanwhile, just a couple of miles away in Newport Beach, a Hard Rock Cafe has opened. While its rival has the word planet in its name and a three-story-high globe out front, the Hard Rock plays the planet card pretty hard itself, with its repeated slogan “Save the Planet” as a decorating motif (its other slogans being “Love All, Serve All” and “Pray for Surf”).

Apart from an enormous neon Fender Stratocaster guitar as its exterior symbol and the wood-paneled Cadillac mounted on top of the bar, the Hard Rock looks more sedate than its rival. It sticks to rock paraphernalia, mostly guitars (and the occasional surfboard) of the famous, but, curiously, it is no louder than that Other Place. The differences are slight--you’ve got your same bar as crowded as a football stadium at halftime, the continuous deafening music, a souvenir shop and even a squawkophone.

The Hard Rock does take itself a bit seriously--flashing numbers indicate that the human population is ever rising and the number of acres of rain forest is ever shrinking, even during the night. The menu, printed on recycled paper, commemorates the day the first Hard Rock opened in London (June 14, 1971).

The menu is more limited than Planet Hollywood’s (and about a third cheaper, maybe because you don’t get movies with your dinner). Curiously, the waitresses wear ‘50s lunch-counter costumes complete with a peculiar strip of fabric that’s supposed to suggest the elegance of a French maid’s cap.

Some of the food is pretty good. The chicken wings do not come with the usual red-pepper and blue-cheese flavorings but in an odd mustard and apricot sauce, and they’re a bargain: absolutely huge wings. The grilled vegetables are good, if a little sweet, a three-quarter-pound steak (which comes with a plain baked potato) is dense and smoky, and the lime-marinated barbecued chicken is worth ordering.

I’d also say good things about the generous triple-decker BLT on wheat toast, except that the bacon is on the chewy side, like pork jerky. The baby back ribs in sweet watermelon BBQ sauce are OK, but possibly because of the noise level I couldn’t taste them (they’re better than the ribs at the Planet, anyway). Though the hamburger is good and moderately thick, the vegetable burger couldn’t be mistaken for meat in a thousand years; it tastes just like vegetables, rice and nuts in a bun. The onion rings, bean-heavy chili, nachos and quesadilla are fairly standard issue.

The Hard Rock serves wonderful chocolate desserts: a very rich devil’s-food cake, a hot fudge sundae with good hot fudge sauce, a nice brownie that comes with vanilla ice cream, and a semi-frozen milkshake that has a bitter-chocolate flavor. The banana split is a little disappointing, but there’s a tart cheesecake and a very good angel-food version of strawberry shortcake called Wimbledon Final.

Hey, can we get some more wings over here? Hey, waitress, over here! Listen to me, I know Bruce Springsteen personally!

I swear it!

Planet Hollywood, South Coast Village Plaza, 1641 W. Sunflower Ave., Santa Ana; (714) 434-7827. Lunch and dinner served daily. Full bar. All major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $30-$63.

Hard Rock Cafe Newport, Fashion Island, 451 Newport Center Drive, Newport Beach; (714) 640-8844. Lunch and dinner served daily. Full bar. Valet parking. All major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $22-$46.