Guy Fieri haterz >
downtownrobbrown
446 Posts
Brutal review of his new restie.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/14/dining/reviews/restaurant-review-guys-american-kitchen-bar-in-times-square.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/14/dining/reviews/restaurant-review-guys-american-kitchen-bar-in-times-square.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Quote:
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 jalape??os 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.
Guy???s American Kitchen & Bar
POOR
220 West 44th Street (Seventh Avenue), (646) 532-4897, guysamerican.com.
ATMOSPHERE 500 seats, three levels, three bars, one chaotic mess.
SERVICE The well-meaning staff seems to realize that this is not a real restaurant.
SOUND LEVEL Rawk and roll, but at moderate volumes.
RECOMMENDED Roasted Pork Bahn Mi, General Tso???s Crispy Pork Shank, Cedar Plank Salmon with Jalape??o Apricot Jam.
DRINKS AND WINE Margaritas, while too sweet and strong, are the best cocktails. Draft beers are better than the largely dull wines.
PRICES Soups, salads and appetizers, $8.95 to $16.50; sandwiches, pastas and main courses, $16.95 to $31.50.
HOURS Sunday to Wednesday, 11:30 a.m. to midnight; Thursday to Saturday, 11:30 a.m. to 1 a.m.
RESERVATIONS Accepted.
WHEELCHAIR ACCESS The bar area and an accessible restroom are on street level.
WHAT THE STARS MEAN Ratings range from zero to four stars and reflect the reviewer???s reaction primarily to food, with ambience, service and price taken into consideration.
Comments
location anyone?
leftover rape donk's ?
the writer should justly find dude and just stab him in the eye to death asap and put that cunt out of our misery
As annoying as I personally find Guy to be at times, I think the article is a pretty dick move.
The fact that this mean shit is coming from someone who seems to have never cooked professionally in his life (according to any bio's I've found on the dude) makes his criticism even meaner and less relevant...Perhaps, when you are writing to advise an audience who also hasn't cooked professionally then his cooking experience (or lack thereof) is an irrelevant point...but I feel if you are going to outright bash the living shit out of a place, it helps to have at least some credibility/experience in the profession.
Just my opinion...keep fighting the good fight, Pete.
Is this guy going to review Burger King or Applebee's next?
Visit NBCNews.com for #999 !important; font-weight:normal !important; height: 13px; color:#5799DB !important;" href="http://www.nbcnews.com">breaking news, #999 !important; font-weight:normal !important; height: 13px; color:#5799DB !important;">world news, and #999 !important; font-weight:normal !important; height: 13px; color:#5799DB !important;">news about the economy
Are you sure? I've never heard of any good restaurants in New York City. I've heard good things about this "Olive Garden" from my TV, though.
Dude is free game since its serving food, but this like writing an extensive article about the local lemonade stand.
"Little Samantha was too busy playing Angry Birds to notice she added way too much sugar."
"The lack of product diversity at the M&M store in Times Square was simply appalling. 200,000 square feet, and nary a Whatchamacallit in sight. Disgraceful."
It's not like this place wants to be a diner. It pretends to serve special creations by a celebrity chef. Of course this guy is not a real chef but a tv celebrity and a business man but he sells himself as a down to earth lover of blue collar all American food done the right way. And obviously his restaurant serving his own signature dishes does not deliver. So yeah, I think it's totally legitimate to set him straight and tell him what his shit food really tastes like. Blue drinks in 2012? Artificially flavored watermelon Margaritas? I'm 100% sure every single word about the drinks, the food and the service was accurate and well deserved. If the review only makes a handful of tourists not go in there and instead do a bit of research, wander off of Times Square and have some real food in a real restaurant then it already served a purpose.
I mean the place as a 2.5 star rating on Yelp... yeah I know you shouldn't too much rely on Yelp but that's a pretty horrendous rating for a restaurant.
what about music critics who have never made music?
It's the end product being critiqued, not the process.
The idea that you need to be a chef in order to know if something tastes good is a curious one, imo.
I think they ran this because the restaurant industry in NYC is hurting right now after Sandy. Being critical of a piece of a big company is much easier and acceptable than picking apart a small restaurant that might be in dire straights after the storm.
Is he annoying? Yeah, he can be. His little catchphrases, like most catchphrases, get old the first time you hear them. But he just seems like the one uncle who dresses like a clown and is embarrassing, but really, is a nice, smart guy.
But I'm not about to try to defend the use of "Donkey Sauce" in any way.
^^^Always asks for extra donkey sauce on his tenderberry taco.
I am actively trying to find a way to work that into everyday usage.
I laughed.
Same feeling, honestly. Even if they have made music....taste is an individual thing, in my opinion. There is no need for the critic to me. It's never something I look for. If criticism comes up in a two way conversation from a friend or in a forum like Soulstrut, I can see value in that.
But, a written one way scathing criticism of something that is totally individual (art, taste, etc.) just seems like a loud mouth talking shit.
All just my opinion, of course.
You might wanna fix your original post. You accidentally a word.
Ahhhh shit....I'm not even gonna fix it. Let it sit there for everyone to see. It's been quoted too many times at this point. Thanks for the heads up, though.
Meant to be "NEVER had a need...".
People who like to eat good food, those self proclaimed "foodies" (oh god how much I hate that word) watch this show and then wander along Times Square and are like "hey, I know this guy from television, he genuinely cares about good, classic American food, let's go in there instead of any of the tourist traps around here".
Mind you the NYT review isn't about a TGIF or some other franchise, it 's about a singular restaurant owned by a celebrity chef. The author probably did his research and found out that even fans of the guy and his show had bad experiences at the restaurant. So what's illegitimate about going there to find out what's really going on?
All his observations to me speak of a carelessly run business.
He starts off by quoting the menu and unless he's flat out lying, it says shit like ???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,??? Come on... how would you expect this to go down with any food critic or with any halfway sane person? What follows are all observations about how neglectfula nd uninspired the service was and how atrocious the food. Sure, generous sides of vitriol but hey, the author went there repeatedly (I heard 4 times?), probably because he first thought he caught them on an off night and then probably just because he couldn't couldn't believe how bad the place really was. You don't become a food writer for the NYT without knowing a whole lot more about food than most of us will ever know. So don't shoot the messenger. I'm personally convinced that this place is every bit as bad as he makes it sound. Maybe even worse.
I personally had fun reading the review. Not only because I hate this guy. I think he's an obnoxious know-nothing who shouldn't be let near food and instead maybe do a wrestling show. But hey, I probably couldn't stand a whole ton of chefs whose food I ate. Everybody who ever worked in a restaurant kitchen knows that a fairly high percentage of chefs are just disgusting people, some of them might even qualify as sociopaths. Outside of the artificial world of food tv and celebrity chefs, working in a restaurant kitchen is amongst the hardest ways to earn a living. You don't succeed by being a sweet person and just having a whole lot of love for good food. You succeed when you can handle an unimaginable amount of pressure and hard work under some of the most demanding and challenging conditions any really hard job could ever throw at you. Food critics know that. They don't care much about the personality or character of the chef or restaurant owner. They know how hard it is to open and to sustain a restaurant. They know how high the stakes are. Food is a fickle thing. You usually can't repair anything. The numbers in terms of cost productivity are very, very hard. You mess up one main for a table of 4, the restaurant will not make a dime on the entire table. Unless they order two $200 bottles of wine. If you're a millionaire tv celebrity you don't have to care much about these things. Especially with $30 for a main course consisting of generic and cheap ingredients. It makes my blood boil when some yahoo who can't cook shit and who has no respect for good food makes a ton of money with some idiotic tv show and then, like pestilence crawls across the country opening up one shit restaurant after the other just because he can and because he's a fat, greedy fuck-face with a two-tone chin-muff who can't rake in enough dough, fully knowing that the only reason any idiot would ever set foot in one of his useless "restaurants" is because they've seen his mug on tv.
"Eat shit suckers, millions of flies can't be wrong. Here, have some donkey sauce with that!"