Lifestyles

The Good-Eats Guy

According to the Food Network’s Guy Fieri, real men do eat sushi.

“You know what real men eat? Real men eat everything. Real people take a chance,” says the host of the breakout hit Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives.

“I don’t like Rocky Mountain oysters, nor am I a big fan of chicken livers, but I tried them—and not just because the camera was rolling. I have to be able to look at the people I teach Food Network stuff to and say I’m willing to try it.

“Do I anticipate I’ll be eating Rocky Mountain oysters in the near future? I doubt it. But it was put in front of me and I tried it. So when people tell me they won’t try sushi, the first thing I say is that I guarantee I can get them to eat it. Okay, what would you rather do—eat sushi or wear your underwear on your head? If they say they’d rather wear their shorts on their head, I put a plate of seasoned rice in front of them. That’s sushi. What some people don’t know is that sushi means seasoned rice. They just get caught up in their prejudices against trying it. So now go and put that underwear on your head.”

Making food not only fun but accessible, while not dumbing things down, is what Guy ‘Guido’ Fieri is all about.

“Food doesn’t have to be pretentious. I do a radio show about food and wine called Food Guy and Marci. Marci is my co-host and the wife of comedian Tommy Smothers. The tag line at the beginning of the show is, ‘Fighting against boring food and pretentious wine.’

“Let’s simply break it down: Brisket is awesome. Why? Because it’s loaded with fat. What do you do with it? Slow-cook it over a long time. It doesn’t need a lot of seasoning, you just have to cook it right. I speak in general terms and not on the esoteric levels that a lot of food descriptions can operate at. Real speak, the way we all talk.”

Straight away, you know from talking with Fieri that what you see on the tube is what you get in real life: a guy with spiked blond hair, covered in tattoos and piratical earrings who dresses in bowling shirts, board shorts and flip flops—a man with a laugh as hearty as his appetite. Take Emeril Lagasse out of the equation and Fieri might seem the unlikeliest of breakout stars on a network renown for its soft-spoken, elegantly attired personalities.

“I got out of the corporate world and opened my first restaurant because I got sick of wearing a suit and tie. I love good weather, I love sunshine, figured if I wanted to wear shorts all the time, I’d wear shorts. I don’t like to feel constricted, which is why bowling shirts are nice. I don’t even button them up. I pull them over my head, like a t-shirt,” Fieri says, adding a riff of his trademark husky chuckle. “When I was in New York City in November of 2005 competing on The Next Food Network Star, I wore shorts. People were like, ‘What’s wrong with you?’ and asked me if I was doing it to be edgy. I don’t really own any pants, don’t wear them at home, just shorts, so that’s what I wore through the show’s entirety.”

Fieri’s prize for winning the competition was his own cooking show, Guy’s Big Bite. In 2008 he assumed co-host duties on a third series, Ultimate Recipe Showdown, in which everyday folk go head-to-head in a cook-off armed only with prized home recipes for the chance to win $25,000. But it was his second foray in front of the camera, Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives, that catapulted Fieri’s celebrity into the culinary and ratings stratosphere with his no-nonsense exploration of the best comfort food found off the beaten path from coast to coast—perhaps the format where he feels most at home.

Guy’s Big Bowl Bite

Guy Fieri loves his football almost as much as his food. So any chance to combine the two is a guaranteed touchdown.

“Football is my middle name. I’m a Raiders fan, so it’s silver and black all the way.

“One of things I tell people during football season, whether they’re barbequing or tailgating, is to be prepared. In either scenario, there’s always a lot going on and your prep facility and your cooking apparatus are going to be limited, so I recommend taking some time the day prior to really set yourself up for success,” he says.

“To start with, put your food in usable proportions. There’s no way that an enormous rack of ribs is going to sit on a little Webber grill, so cut the rack in half. Do your marinating ahead of time. I also think that selection is an important choice. Don’t just buy an enormous tub of bland potato salad. Go into a nice deli and get some pesto orzo, a good potato salad, maybe even a green salad. Have an assortment. I love going to a football game and running around like crazy, but it’s nice to have the social, culinary moment, too. And I probably haven’t paid for a football ticket in I don’t know how many years because I’m the kind of dude who always shows up with the food.

“Just about my favorite thing to do for tailgating: You take some tinfoil and fold it over in four layers, about eighteen inches long by however wide the foil comes in. Make two of these sheets of foil that are extra thick. Then take some quality sliced roast beef, some onions, a little bit of chopped garlic, your favorite barbeque sauce and a little bit of Worcestershire sauce. Make a boat out of one of the sheets of tinfoil, lay all of the ingredients down in it, and then put the other sheet over it and fold the corners up, rolling the sides around tightly. Now you’ve got this little, portable aluminum foil gift. You don’t have a grill with you? No problem. Throw it on the manifold of your truck when you arrive at the game and in twenty minutes you’re going to have yourself some nice heated-up barbeque beef sandwiches. Grab some turkey, some lemon juice, throw in some sour cream, onions, sliced jalapenos, a little Pepper Jack cheese and do the same thing. Grab some shrimp, some lime, butter and wedges of potato, add a little Old Bay seasoning, toss in some green onions and cook it a little less than the other two and you’ve got a nice little shrimp boil. I’ll make four or five little tinfoil packets like this. You get them going, then slice them down the top like Jiffy Pop popcorn, put out some nice ciabatta bread or sourdough rolls and let people dig into it. That right there is a winter winner. Tell me that doesn’t get you right to the Heartland!”

“Like me, that show truly is what you see is what you get. It’s awesome on so many levels, but the greatest underlying factor is that it affects the lives of the owners of these little restaurants in such an incredible and positive way.

“Being a small restaurant owner myself, the giving back is the biggest highlight of the whole deal. And the food is amazing, too. I’m a corned beef hash fanatic. The corned beefs across America are as vast in their profile as apples. You get them with a ton of meat and no potatoes, or a ton of potatoes, a lot of spices and no meat, you get them with turkey,” says Fieri says, who stands a lean and mean five-foot-eleven and weighs in at 210 pounds. “I’ve eaten the best corned beef at a little place called the A1 Diner in Maine that sits on stilts, over a river, in an old dining car, and they’re cooking peppers and onions with it, and the dude comes in at five in the morning to make it. I’m telling you, it is the Mack Daddy of corned beef. Pizzas, oh, I’ve had some pizzas that would blow your mind, and chili. Some of the real standouts…I had some wings at a place called Uncle Lou’s in Memphis. They were made with a honey and vinegar barbeque glaze that was completely delicious. I’ve had stuffed burgers in a place called The Nook in St. Paul, Minnesota. There’s a tortilla factory called El Indio in San Diego where they’re grinding the corn, soaking it in lime and water to bring the husks off the kernels, and making their own fresh tortillas daily by the thousands.”

Though he remembers his parents as being excellent cooks, Fieri didn’t so much learn from their example as rebel against it.

“I was raised in different eras and fads in their lives. We went through the macrobiotic phase of cooking. We never had white bread in the house; we had brown bread and things like spinach spaghetti. We didn’t eat a lot of meat. I wanted to branch out when I got old enough and try all of those things we weren’t allowed to eat. When I was ten, my mom said that if I didn’t like what she cooked, then I could make the meal. I went to the grocery store and got the two juiciest, biggest rib-eye steaks I could find, cooked them, and served them over spaghetti. And that’s how this whole crazy career of mine started.”

On those rare occasions when he’s not on the road in search of his next great feast or in the Food Network’s New York headquarters filming the two studio series, Fieri checks in on the trio of Northern California restaurants he co-owns, Johnny Garlic’s California Pasta Grill, Tex Wasabi’s and Russell Ramsey’s Chop House. He’s also something of a gearhead, as most viewers who’ve seen him motoring down the highway behind the wheel of the cherry-red, classic Cadillac convertible, roof down, might guess, or on the back of a hog, which he has ridden both on the TV screen in the flesh and over the computer monitor in the guise of his animated alter ego at Byron Ferguson, his official website.

“I’m a motorcycle junkie,” says Fieri. “But I don’t own a street bike at the moment. Eventually, I’ll have multitudes of them—everything from sports bikes to choppers. But I have a responsibility right now to keep myself out of harm’s way as much as possible because of my two little sons. It kills me, it really does, because I’ve had bikes, I’ve been offered bikes, I can go and buy the best bike I’ve ever dreamed of. But for now, we’re keeping it on the dirt. We have dirt bikes. That’s our compromise.

“I used to ride a Honda street bike back in the 1980s. I even drove a car in a demolition derby once to promote my first restaurant. I really thought I had an idea of what that would be like after watching Fonzie and Pinky Tuscadero do the demolition derby on Happy Days. But I had absolutely no idea that what I was in for was a full-blown thirty-minute car accident. One guy pounding me on the back, another in front at crazy speeds. I did pretty good though and ended up placing third out of fifty cars.”

And if, in Fieri’s words, he could plan that last great supper before the big dirt nap, he knows exactly what he wants on the menu.

“A downhome, really good tomato sauce and some perfectly made meatballs,” he says. “Veal, pork, beef, with fresh basil, oregano, sourdough breadcrumbs that are freshly dried, the meatballs loosely made so that when you put them in your mouth they fall apart, over hand-made spaghetti that’s been air dried and has a nice crust on the outside. That’s it, baby!”

When not doing celebrity interviews for Heartland USA, Greg Norris likes to haunt the outer edge of the literary world. After finishing up this piece, he was out the door to a horror writers convention.