Forget It Jake, It's Flavortown
Why Guy Fieri rules
It started slowly. I’ll admit - it was an improbable romance, catalyzed by the pandemic that waged war outside the cozy confines of my apartment. I had seen him around before, though I never gave him much thought, other than the fact that he seemed to me oafish and irritating. Yet he has now transfixed me.
That man, of course, is Guy Fieri.
In my prime Food Network fandom days, my earliest days of middle school, Guy Fieri never much registered for me. Ace of Cakes, Iron Chef America, $40 a Day were what usually grabbed my attention. I’d catch an errant episode of Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives if nothing better was on, but Mr. Fieri hardly made an impression. Over the years, Fieri emerged as the butt of the joke a la Nickelback or Comic Sans. It’s not hard to see why. The spiky platinum hair, the lurid flamed shirts, saying things like “That sauce is money” or telling a white woman in Iowa that her meatloaf is “gangsta,” none of these signify a card-carrying member of the Food Establishment. Further bolstering my distaste for Fieri was that notorious New York Times review of his Times Square restaurant.
Guy Fieri is a food media mogul, so the article wasn’t exactly punching down. But what did it expect of a Times Square restaurant? The same people eating in chain-restaurant midtown establishments are not usually the same people who read food criticism in the New York Times.
I justified my loathing of Fieri partially on the behest of Anthony Bourdain, a chef and travel writer I long admired. His disdain for Fieri was well-known. Upon the opening of Guy’s American Bar and Grill in Times Square, Bourdain expressed his distaste on the Opie and Anthony radio show, claiming Fieri had “single-handedly turned the neighborhood into the Ed Hardy district which I'm a little pissed off about.” I don’t wish to speak ill of the dead, but had Bourdain been in Times Square in the 25 years before his death? I mean, really, Times Square had been the gaudy fluorescent paean to capitalism that real New Yorkers love to hate long before Fieri ever got there. If anyone should “single-handedly” shoulder the blame for that dystopian affront to God, it’s that cousin-fucker Rudy Giuliani. But the more you think about it, Bourdain and Fieri weren’t actually so different from one another. Bourdain was, essentially, the erudite and iconoclastic New Yorker, to Guy Fieri’s garish court jester. Bourdain was worldly, literally spanning the globe in search of authentic, homemade cuisine, food made from offal, brains, eyes, from parts rejected by most of us Americans. His goal wasn’t to highlight the Michelin starred restaurants and other upscale establishments that can easily be gleaned from TimeOut (though he did visit those places as well). Even when he went to familiar places, he often showed us the vibrant underbelly, the myriad communities that make up an area, the places that weren’t even designed for tourists but for the people who live there.
Guy Fieri, on the other hand, limits his scope to the United States, but his quest remains largely the same as Bourdain’s - great food in often unexpected places. One doesn’t need a passport for Diners, Drive-Ins, and Drives (colloquially referred to as Triple D). One only needs curiosity and a full tank of gas. Fieri rarely visits cosmopolitan food cities like New York or Los Angeles, but rather focuses on smaller towns and mid-sized cities. The “Flavortown” ethos posits that there could be a funky joint right here in your neighborhood if you only know where to look. Triple D is often able to market a local mom and pop establishment better than they could themselves, exposing their business to a national audience. To enter Flavortown is to champion the sensibilities of the common man.
Each episode starts and ends with Fieri in a classic red convertible, shades on, and a shock of platinum hair sticking straight up. “I’m Guy Fieri, and we’re rolling out, looking for America’s greatest diners, drive-ins, and dives.” Watching episodes back to back creates the effect of a closed-loop, as if he really drove from the last episode straight into the one you’re currently watching, like he’s truly been on a never-ending mission since 2006. He will not stop until America and Flavortown are one.
But what is Flavortown exactly? It can’t be charted by the most skilled of cartographers; Flavortown is a state of mind. In an interview with The Wrap, Fieri demystifies Flavortown’s origins:
“I just, unfortunately, run at the mouth. I just say things. Ten-plus years ago, I’m there in a diner, and I said to the guy — he made a pizza, I think — ‘That looks like a manhole cover in Flavortown.’ Because of how big it is,”
Fieri continues: “I do a lot of it to make my film crew laugh, ’cause they’re sitting there listening to this stuff all day long. So I say a one-liner, and it comes up again. Somebody makes some big dish, and I say, ‘Oh, it’s like a steering wheel on the bus to Flavortown.'”
Canonically speaking, this means that Flavortown was founded on labor rights. It was coined as a way to boost morale among his crew. In Flavortown, we believe in both bold flavors and fair wages.
There was something about being trapped inside my apartment all day with nothing to do that made me finally realize Guy’s greatness. Triple D and Guy’s Grocery Games (Triple G) are seemingly endless, inexhaustible sources of entertainment. When plans changed because of COVID-19, when friends and family were suddenly out of reach, Guy Fieri was always there. In my psychology AP class, we learned about a phenomenon called the mere-exposure effect. Essentially, the more we are exposed to something or someone, the more likely it is that eventually, we will like it. This might sound a little “He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother” but Guy Fieri finally got to me. As did Steely Dan. 2020 has been a weird year.
Guy Fieri has also done extensive charity work. When there is calamity, where there is strife and disaster, Guy Fieri will be there, shirt ablaze. When the California wildfires raged on, he canceled his plans so he could cook for the first responders and EMTs, cooking 5,000 meals a day. He helped raise over $20 million for restaurant workers during the pandemic. He once officiated 101 same-sex wedding ceremonies simultaneously, in honor of his late sister.
Yes, Guy Fieri is tacky as hell. But he seems to be a decent guy. So he drives on, red Camaro against the current of popular taste, borne back ceaselessly into Flavortown.