here is the review, pretty brutal...



As Not Seen on TV

By PETE WELLS


GUY FIERI, have you eaten at your new restaurant in Times Square? Have you pulled up one of the 500 seats at Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar and ordered a meal? Did you eat the food? Did it live up to your expectations?

Did panic grip your soul as you stared into the whirling hypno wheel of the menu, where adjectives and nouns spin in a crazy vortex? When you saw the burger described as “Guy’s Pat LaFrieda custom blend, all-natural Creekstone Farm Black Angus beef patty, LTOP (lettuce, tomato, onion + pickle), SMC (super-melty-cheese) and a slathering of Donkey Sauce on garlic-buttered brioche,” did your mind touch the void for a minute?

Did you notice that the menu was an unreliable predictor of what actually came to the table? Were the “bourbon butter crunch chips” missing from your Almond Joy cocktail, too? Was your deep-fried “boulder” of ice cream the size of a standard scoop?

What exactly about a small salad with four or five miniature croutons makes Guy’s Famous Big Bite Caesar (a) big (b) famous or (c) Guy’s, in any meaningful sense?

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?

Why is one of the few things on your menu that can be eaten without fear or regret — a lunch-only sandwich of chopped soy-glazed pork with coleslaw and cucumbers — called a Roasted Pork Bahn Mi, when it resembles that item about as much as you resemble Emily Dickinson?

When you have a second, Mr. Fieri, would you see what happened to the black bean and roasted squash soup we ordered?

Hey, did you try that blue drink, the one that glows like nuclear waste? The watermelon margarita? Any idea why it tastes like some combination of radiator fluid and formaldehyde?

At your five Johnny Garlic’s restaurants in California, if servers arrive with main courses and find that the appetizers haven’t been cleared yet, do they try to find space for the new plates next to the dirty ones? Or does that just happen in Times Square, where people are used to crowding?

If a customer shows up with a reservation at one of your two Tex Wasabi’s outlets, and the rest of the party has already been seated, does the host say, “Why don’t you have a look around and see if you can find them?” and point in the general direction of about 200 seats?

What is going on at this new restaurant of yours, really?

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? When you cruise around the country for your show “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives,” rasping out slangy odes to the unfancy places where Americans like to get down and greasy, do you really mean it?

Or is it all an act? Is that why the kind of cooking you celebrate on television is treated with so little respect at Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar?

How, for example, did Rhode Island’s supremely unhealthy and awesomely good fried calamari — dressed with garlic butter and pickled hot peppers — end up in your restaurant as a plate of pale, unsalted squid rings next to a dish of sweet mayonnaise with a distant rumor of spice?

How did Louisiana’s blackened, Cajun-spiced treatment turn into the ghostly nubs of unblackened, unspiced white meat in your Cajun Chicken Alfredo?

How did nachos, one of the hardest dishes in the American canon to mess up, turn out so deeply unlovable? Why augment tortilla chips with fried lasagna noodles that taste like nothing except oil? Why not bury those chips under a properly hot and filling layer of melted cheese and jalapeños instead of dribbling them with thin needles of pepperoni and cold gray clots of ground turkey?

By the way, would you let our server know that when we asked for chai, he brought us a cup of hot water?

When you hung that sign by the entrance that says, WELCOME TO FLAVOR TOWN!, were you just messing with our heads?

Does this make it sound as if everything at Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar is inedible? I didn’t say that, did I?

Tell me, though, why does your kitchen sabotage even its more appealing main courses with ruinous sides and sauces? Why stifle a pretty good bison meatloaf in a sugary brown glaze with no undertow of acid or spice? Why send a serviceable herb-stuffed rotisserie chicken to the table in the company of your insipid Rice-a-Roni variant?

Why undermine a big fist of slow-roasted pork shank, which might fly in many downtown restaurants if the General Tso’s-style sauce were a notch less sweet, with randomly shaped scraps of carrot that combine a tough, nearly raw crunch with the deadened, overcooked taste of school cafeteria vegetables?

Is this how you roll in Flavor Town?

Somewhere within the yawning, three-level interior of Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar, is there a long refrigerated tunnel that servers have to pass through to make sure that the French fries, already limp and oil-sogged, are also served cold?

What accounts for the vast difference between the Donkey Sauce recipe you’ve published and the Donkey Sauce in your restaurant? Why has the hearty, rustic appeal of roasted-garlic mayonnaise been replaced by something that tastes like Miracle Whip with minced raw garlic?

And when we hear the words Donkey Sauce, which part of the donkey are we supposed to think about?

Is the entire restaurant a very expensive piece of conceptual art? Is the shapeless, structureless baked alaska that droops and slumps and collapses while you eat it, or don’t eat it, supposed to be a representation in sugar and eggs of the experience of going insane?

Why did the toasted marshmallow taste like fish?

Did you finish that blue drink?

Oh, and we never got our Vegas fries; would you mind telling the kitchen that we don’t need them?

Thanks.

not doing too good on yelp either...
http://www.yelp.com/biz/guys-american-kitchen-and-bar-new-york-2

i kinda feel bad for guy, as i think he's definatly become a target in the restaurant/chef world due to his personality. seems like this place is more like a tgi fridays with a twist, yet people wanna bash it for not being fine dining. now i'm sure there are a bunch of problems, not the least of which are some of the names of the menu items. i would be fucking embarassed to ask for an order of "Ain’t No Thing Butta Chicken Wing" why do these chefs feel it necessary to give "funky" names to everyday items? how about just an order of wings?

with that said, the place has only been open for two months so i'm sure there are still alot of bugs to work out, and lets be honest here, a place like this draws more from the fame of the owner than the quality of the food. furthermore, with the amount of foot traffic in the area, whether or not the food is as bad as some are saying there is a steady stream of suckers willing to try it out, and i doubt they will need to rely on repeat customers as much as a place without all the fanfare or name recognition of the owner. in that sense, the negative reviews are unlikely to hurt this place as much as some others. i do enjoy DDD though, particularly when he tries something that you can tell he doesn't really like, but tries to say something good about the dish anyway

Sorry, FF. But I can't stand the guy. I love the concept of DDD, but I just can't stomach that Calfifornia Boy schtick of his. He's even more revolting when he reminds people that he's half Italian. Like we even want him .

But to each his own .

Not a big fan of Fieri either, pb. However, I do like the concept of DDD but you can tell that his obnoxious manner weighs thin on some of those restaurant owners.

His response:
http://www.freep.com/article/20121115/NEWS07/121115037/guy-fieri-responds-to-new-york-times-review

It's a great way to make a name for yourself — go after a celebrity chef that's not a New Yorker that's doing big concept in his second month.

Yeah, that's it, Guy. It's because you're not a New Yorker . Damn carpetbagger!

If you can't take it, go back to Cali. Fuckin hippie, beach bum, pothead, douchebag .

Ego is a touchy thing.
I've not seen Fieri's show but I think most people would respond defensively to such an awesome takedown..especially if it's true..snicker

did he give you food poisoning or something PB? i'm not a huge fan of his, although like i said, i do enjoy DDD more so for getting to see some pretty good places to eat, rather than his personality. there is some truth to making a name for yourself by going after a celebrity chef, not really anything to do with being from ny or not imo. and hey, a little weed never hurt anybody, got it?

No, I just pretty much hated him on sight. Then when he opened his mouth, it all became justified .


But Fieri is the one who got defensive and injected not being from New York into the interview, so now he's fair game. So as a 53 year resident of New York City, I'll say it again: I hope he goes back to Cali, gets hit by a big wave, gets amnesia, and starts dressing in women's clothes at the Venice Pier.


Like I said, to each his own, buddy. I don't proselytize when it comes to religion, politics, drugs or taste in food. I learned a long time ago that no can can change anyone else's mind on such matters. So arguing is pointless.

Now if you'll excuse me, there's a chilled bottle of Ketel One waiting for me at home .

enjoy this pizzaboy, goes great with a nice cosmopolitan

Now that's priceless!

The fella with the bleached toilet brush hair is not a patch on the fat fella from Brooklyn who does Man v Food.

Personally, I prefer watching Giada De Laurentiss.

Just sayin'...

I did her. They're real. And they're spectacular.

i like this picture for a couple different reasons

^^^^
Brumsky!!!!

Me too.

I can't stand that Guy guy. He's apparently close to Restaurant Impossible's, Robert Irvine, though. He was best man at his wedding. They aired it on tv.

edit: or is that guy Guy?

You guys made my day!