Flavortown’s elder statesman
Guy Fieri still playing it for laughs, but he’s winning food-world respect
Guy Fieri looks as if he has prepared his whole life to be a middle-aged rock star. He has grays in the famous goatee now, a faint tan line beneath his chain necklace and a pair of hulking middle-finger rings that do not slow his incorrigible fist-bumping.
In the 15 years since he began “Diners, DriveIns and Dives,” his Food Network flagship, Fieri, 54, has become perhaps the most powerful and bankable figure in food television. And by dint of that show’s success, certain perceptions have attached to him through the years, perpetuating the caricature he still often seems eager to play.
He would like a word about all that.
“If you only hear Metallica as a heavy-metal band, then you are not hearing Metallica,” Fieri said. “Now, maybe you don’t like that style. But they’re real musicians.”
For nearly two decades, Fieri has plainly believed he was a real musician, contributing worthy entries to the canon.
What is striking now, long after the parody seemed to congeal, is that the wider food community stands ready to believe him.
Fieri has emerged as one of the most influential food philanthropists of the COVID-19 age, helping to raise more than $20 million for restaurant workers. He has established himself as an industry mentor among chefs who may or may not admire his cooking but recognize his gifts as a messenger, which have boosted business for the hundreds of restaurants featured on his show. He has won the blessing of the white-tablecloth set through sheer force of charisma and relentlessness, coaxing a reconsideration of how the food
establishment treated him in the first place.
“I don’t think he had the respect of people like me or people in the food industry,” said Traci Des Jardins, an acclaimed Bay Area chef who has become a friend. “He has earned that respect.”
“An amazing individual,” said philanthropic chef Jose Andres, recalling how Fieri churned out plates of turkey for wildfire evacuees in 2018.
“Whether he likes it or not,” said Andrew Zimmern, a fellow food television veteran, “he has become an elder statesman.”
For the first 25 seconds of his 2005 audition reel for “The Next Food Network Star,” Fieri presented himself as a proper snob. He welcomed viewers to Sonoma County and pledged to prepare a dish “not in fusion but in con-fusion” — a Gorgonzola tofu sausage terrine over a “mildly poached” ostrich egg, with Grape-Nuts and pickled herring mousse.
Fieri shivered at his own faux brilliance. He clasped his hands and stared, as if waiting for his audience to agree. And then: “Ha, ha, haaa. No, seriously, folks, real food for real people. That’s the idea.”
Fieri proceeded to make a roll filled with rice, pork butt, fries and avocado. He described his parents’ macrobiotic diet in his youth, saddling him with “enough bulgur and steamed fish to kill a kid” and leaving him no choice but to cook up alternatives.
He ticked through his well-curated biography — a year studying in France; a hospitality degree from the University of Nevada in Las Vegas; a stab at his own casual restaurants in California — with such conviction that it almost made sense watching a man lay fries and barbecue over sushi rice.
Revisiting the video, what stands out is how fully formed Fieri’s public image was before a single television producer could think to meddle.
His hairstylist friend gave him the bleached spikes on a lark one day, and they stuck. His buddies knew his talents for tableto-table rat-a-tat and urged him to make a tape. The ethos was effectively airlifted to “Diners, DriveIns and Dives” shortly after he won the next food star competition and has never much changed.
“It’s been super hard to rip off, and I’ve tried numerous times,” said Jordan Harman, who helped develop the show in 2007 and is now at A+E Networks. “You can redo the same beats, the same kind of places, the same kind of food. But there’s a magic that he brings that is really not replicable.”
Fieri took to fame quickly, hustling as if the window might be brief. He appeared at local fairs and casino shows because they invited him. He autographed spatulas and bell peppers because fans asked him to.
Friends say Fieri expanded his empire with almost clinical resolve, tending to a portfolio that came to include books, knives, a winery, a line of tequilas and several shows. Today, his name graces dozens of restaurants across six countries and more than a few cruise ships.
Fieri remarked in 2010 that his “fame rocket” would shoot skyward for only so long, reasoning that he must “do what I can for the program while it lasts.” (By “the program,” he meant his wife, Lori, and two sons in Santa Rosa, California, along with his parents and a cast of tag-along pals.)
His Times Square restaurant, Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar, can feel in hindsight like an exercise in overextension, an assumption of manifest destiny powered by swagger and a signature Donkey Sauce.
“Like, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m going to do this, and it’s just going to be another big success for me,’ ” said Zimmern, summarizing Fieri’s confidence. “But you need to make sure that the food is absolutely perfect.” It was not.
And a blazing New
York Times review in
2012 (“Guy Fieri, have you eaten at your new restaurant?”) dovetailed with an already-rolling sendup of Fieri across the culture. He was skewered on “Saturday Night Live,” preparing Thanksgiving “turduckenrab-pig-cow-cow-horsenish-game-hen” fried in Jagermeister. His likeness became fodder for undercooked Halloween costumes nationwide.
He was invited to a Manhattan roast of Anthony Bourdain, a frequent antagonist who once said that Fieri appeared “designed by committee,” and often took more incoming than the honoree.
Lee Brian Schrager, founder of the South Beach Wine & Food Festival, remembered the evening as “the single most uncomfortable night of my life.”
“He went through the war,” Schrager said of Fieri. “He won.”
Fieri appraises himself now as “a little more mellow, a little more methodical” — and maybe a little likelier to prize mentorship of the next class of television chef, including his son Hunter, over his own celebrity.
Yet the likeliest explanation for his durability, for his heightened esteem among some peers, is deceptively simple.
“He seeks to understand rather than be understood,” Zimmern said, “which I think is as high a compliment as I can give.”
Reminded of his 2010 line about capitalizing before his “fame rocket” crashed to earth, Fieri insisted he still viewed his celebrity horizon as finite.
“There will be a time when the light doesn’t shine as bright on the golden locks,” he said. “Which is cool.”