And he's been getting skewered by reviewers. They NY Times review by Pete Wells is a piece of critical art. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/14/d...uys-american-kitchen-bar-in-times-square.html
lol. Great review. Makes you wonder how good some of those "off the hook" places he raves about on his show really are.
Guy F. Begs to Differ "I just thought it was ridiculous," Fieri, 44, said Thursday. "I've read reviews. There's good and there's bad in the restaurant business. But that, to me, went so overboard. It really seemed like there was another agenda." Fieri said he had a problem with the tone and the question-style nature of the piece. Practically the entire article was posed as a series of questions, beginning with: "GUY FIERI...
Savannah Guthrie asks him about Donkey Sauce at the end of this clip. He's "tryin really hard" apparently. Wouldn't it have been easier to slap his stupid face on a Times Sq. Appelbee's? http://gawker.com/5960823/guy-fieri...d-like-there-was-another-agenda?post=54333720
He was on CNBC today defending his restaurant. I don't really watch the guy's program, but the food did look really bad and he didn't even looked convincing in defending his product. The whole thing was just so fake and staged.
Here's the thing - it's impossible to run a good Times Square restaurant and still make money. Unless Fieri takes Matthew Yglesias' suggestion to turn his restaurant into a loss leader, the food will suck.
Guy Fieri - douching it up over Thanksgiving at a CA park http://gawker.com/5963113/was-guy-fieri-the-biggest-douche-in-the-woods-this-thanksgiving
I'm sure his restaurant sucks big time, but that Times review was about as insufferable as a Pitchfork album review. I love a good dressing down as much as the next guy, but not if it's such an easy and pathetic target in the first place.
I have no problem with the review. Guy's whole TV shtick is finding great small restaurants around America and showing off their food. This restaurant was supposed to be an off-shoot of that, offering all sorts of food from around the country tangentially based on what he's seen and eaten. However, almost every item the reviewer tried failed in the basics of how they should actually be prepared. If a restaurant is failing on that sort of a level with its food then it deserves to be excortiated and people should know. I don't go into chain restaurants expecting much but I can go to any Red Robin in the country and my french fries will be crisp. I can go into any Chili's in the country and get BBQ ribs that are sufficient for a chain. I've heard that Guy's restaurants in California are half-way decent but this is pretty much a money grab.
Right, I agree. I'm not doubting the place sucked ass and I'm not defending the restaurant here. But what was the reviewer really expecting? When you say to me: "gimmick restaurant in Times Square with obnoxious Food Network personality flavor of month plastered all over it", the first and only word in my head that would come up is trainwreck. And I'm not even a foodie. There's no way in hell a food critic went in there without his mind already made up. I was looking forward to reading it because I hate Guy Fieri like everyone else does, but it just came across like one of those Pitchfork reviewers licking his chops at a chance to review some sellout's latest shitty album so he can empty out all of his zingers he's been practicing.
I'd be willing to buy this argument if we were talking about a Bubba Gump Shrimp or Olive Garden. This was, however, unrealistically, billed as a place for decent eats by a chef who cares about "big bold flavors", kind of a showroom/grand experiment in edible dining in Times Square. He may be obnoxious, but Fieri sells himself as someone who cares about the process and flavors and "gets" the whole mom & pop vibe. And then, the whole "elitist NY Times guy picks on cuddly not-New Yorker" angle is stupid, since Pete Wells is pretty harsh on fancy restaurants too - he gave one star to Le Cirque, one of those jackets required places. And Michael White, who has way more cred with the foodie crowd, got zero stars from Wells for Nicoletta. Wells' reviews are always sharp-tongued - this one only went viral because there are people who dislike Fieri. *Also, the "Ha ha, NY Times had an office dinner there" is kind of a silly point.
Very well then, I withdraw my point. I was operating under the assumption it was a gimmick restaurant along the lines of Bubba Gump or something like that. I didn't realize this was being hyped as something more special.
It's not gunning for Michelin stars or anything and the target is still tourists, but it's meant more like a showcase than a branch of his restaurants, I think.
I still don't get tourists eating the same crap that they do in Wichita. If I go to New Orleans, I sure as shit ain't eating a po' boy at an Applebee's. You're spending thousands of dollars on a trip to NY, take a subway and hit any number of hundreds of great restaurants. So lame.
And there's a frickin velvet rope line outside of Abercrombie on Fifth Avenue. I mean, I get that a lot of tourists are staying in Midtown hotels and they're doing theater at night so they're not going to venture too far out (and 8th Avenue around 42nd is totally sketch), and there aren't affordable and palatable options aren't the easiest to find in that neighborhood. But shit, just pull up the Yelp app and do 3 minutes of research, right?
Took me all of 30 seconds to find this one about the top 10 Hell's Kitchen restaurants http://blogs.villagevoice.com/forkintheroad/2012/07/10_best_hells_k.php
My wife and I were in that neighborhood about a year ago. We wandered around and saw a little Asian place that looked good, so we went in and had a great meal. Really not that hard to do in NYC.
Went with my wife to a Peruvian restaurant that was in one of Guy Fieri's shows. Not really his normal type of place; I wouldn't call it a diner, drive-in, or dive. A storefront restaurant with good food that wasn't particularly cheap -- soups were $15 to $25, alright they were a meal in a bowl but still ... At any rate, I ordered the dish that was Guy's recommendation. It was OK but dull. My wife got something else. It was GREAT. Pretty much sums up Guy, I would say. He sometimes stumbles upon places that can cook but it's pretty much accident, and even when he does he won't order the right thing.
You can count on the ones from the earlier episodes. I've been to a few of them, and they've been good. In the later episodes, he's been going to places that were opened "way back in 2007."