Food Network star flies in for damage-control campaign after bad review of Guy's American Kitchen and Bar goes viral
It's not often that a restaurant review goes viral, but the New York Times's assault on US celebrity chef Guy Fieri's two-month-old Times Square restaurant has become a runaway internet hit.
Fieri took a red-eye flight to the east coast on Thursday, to engage in some serious damage control via the medium of a softball interview on NBC's Today show. Fieri, the Food Network's bleached-blond bad boy, claimed he had been unfairly maligned by the Times reviewer, Pete Wells.
"I think we all know what's going on here," Fieri said to the Today show's Savannah Guthrie. "He came into Guy's American Kitchen and Bar with a different agenda. He came in four times to a restaurant that's been open two months. That's tough times."
The Times review, published Tuesday, has gone down in the internet's extremely short memory as a classic, not least because of its format: every sentence bar the final one is a question. It opens with "Guy Fieri, have you eaten at your new restaurant in Times Square?" and continues in the same vein:
Were you struck by how very far from awesome the Awesome Pretzel Chicken Tenders are? If you hadn't come up with the recipe yourself, would you ever guess that the shiny tissue of breading that exudes grease onto the plate contains either pretzels or smoked almonds? Did you discern any buttermilk or brine in the white meat, or did you think it tasted like chewy air?
Other samples include:
When you hung that sign by the entrance that says, WELCOME TO FLAVOR TOWN!, were you just messing with our heads?
And:
Has anyone ever told you that your high-wattage passion for no-collar American food makes you television's answer to Calvin Trillin, if Mr Trillin bleached his hair, drove a Camaro and drank Boozy Creamsicles?
In an interview with Poynter, Wells said that he had not given the bad review lightly, and revealed that NYT policy is for reviewers to visit a venue on more than one occasion, in order to ensure a fair review. He explained that the format of his review had come naturally:
I really did have a lot of questions; there was so much about the restaurant that I couldn't figure out... When I sat down to think about how I was going to approach the review, I just started going over the things I couldn't understand and the things that seemed so strange to me. They really started to add up to the point where I thought, boy, I really could just keep going with this."
Needless to say, users of the internet interested in schadenfreude – which is say most of the internet – loved it:
Faced with Fieri's theory regarding a hidden agenda, NBC's Guthrie pointed out that Fieri's restaurant wasn't exactly going over well with people who are not New York Times food critics either. Fieri acknowledged the possibility that his menu might be less than perfect. "We're doing the best we can," he said.
The restaurant's current Yelp.com rating is a mediocre 2 1/2 stars.
"The steak was so rubbery it felt like I was chewing beaver tail," wrote Yelp reviewer James J, who reviewed the restaurant on the same day the Times review was published.
"Why doesn't Times Square have eateries that reflect the best of America, not the worst," wrote another reviewer visiting from Fieri's native Sonoma County, California. "I would expect more from New York City, and especially from Guy."
There is no question that Fieri is having a tough week. Not only was it another chance for snarky people to make the obvious "Nickelback of the food community" jokes, but the Times review was published at a seriously inopportune time. That day, Fieri donated 50% of his New York restaurant's proceeds to Hurricane Sandy relief efforts. (Wells did share this tidbit on Twitter.)