As Not Seen on TV Restaurant Review: Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar in Times Square

[XemaSab]

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?

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/14/dining/reviews/restaurant-review-guys-american-kitchen-bar-in-times-square.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0

[fishwax]

1. lol -- have you seen this one from the New York Observer?

When I saw your thread title, I was thinking it would be this review, which came out a couple of weeks ago. It doesn't discuss the food as much as the Times review, but is more of a cultural analysis: http://observer.com/2012/10/the-crispy-crimes-of-guy-fieri/

The Crispy Crimes of Guy Fieri: Junk Food T.V. Star Takes Times Square

In January of 1968, the beginning of a year when the world caught on fire, Guy Ferry was born in a hospital in Columbus, Ohio. And in that moment, though America would not realize it for years to come, she had welcomed into her heartland perhaps her greatest homegrown besmircher, the seed of her undoing. A baby then, now a middle-aged man, Ferry would go on to gain weight, change his name to the more ethnic-sounding Fieri, frost the tips of his hair blond, wear his sunglasses on the back of his head, become a Food Network star and open, at the beginning of September, Guy’s American Kitchen and Bar in Times Square, a restaurant that would be indicted for crimes against humanity, if only that crime fell within the Department of Health’s purview.

It would be disingenuous to claim that Times Square represents anything but a regurgitation of the American dream, monetized, metastasized, made blindingly bright by light-emitting diodes and shoved back down the gullets of those souls unlucky enough to have mistakenly stumbled into the red zone, or worse, like moths to the incinerating flame, have actively sought it out. To deride Mr. Fieri for opening his restaurant there as if he’d taken a dump in the Louvre is silly. He pooped on a pile of bright shiny poop, Jeff Koonsian poop, Guy Debordian poop. But public defecation is still a crime in New York City (Health Code Section 153.09), and his offenses rest not in their location but in their very nature.

Mr. Fieri not only serves truly horrible-tasting food, an awkward origami of clashing aleatory flavors, but he serves this punishing food emulsified with a bombastic recasting of deep-fried American myth. Mr. Fieri’s most egregious transgression isn’t what he puts into his fellow citizens’ stomachs, it’s how the cynical slop interfaces with what he puts into their minds.

The conflation of Guy Fieri with America itself begins as soon as one can discern his storefront signage, just west of the dying Daffy’s sign and just east of the benign Bowlmor Lanes guy. Above the threshold of the 500-seat restaurant sits a massive eagle crest, clearly an allusion to the Great Seal of the United States. The breast feathers of this eagle, whose head is covered in metal stars and stripes, are made of vintage license plates; its tail feathers are tiles of flattened beer cans. In place of the escutcheon, traditionally a blue chief with vertical red and white stripes, are a series of stacked car grilles. And across its chest, written in red neon, is the expletive “Guy!”

[Joe Shlabotnik]

2. I'll think I'll pass on the slathered donkey sauce.

Actually I'd never willingly give my money to anyone who's persona is so annoying anyway.

[Systematic Chaos]

3. Guy FERRY? And his restaurant sucks this bad?

This makes me glad I'll never get close enough to New York to ever consider giving that place a go. Assuming it stays open for long after this press.

[XemaSab]

4. Uhoh

We're posting in the same thread.

[Systematic Chaos]

6. Ooh, snap!

We're double-teaming poor Mr. FERRY.

[Fridays Child]

5. I seriously doubt that he gives a rat's ass about anything except for "greens."

[whistler162]

7. Calling Gordon Ramsey or Robert Irvine

help needed in Times Square!

[csziggy]

10. Now that would be some reality TV worth watching!

Get BOTH of them to go 'help' Guy straighten out his restaurant. It would be epic, though I bet there would be some blood spilled before it was over.

Guy 'helped' Robert Irvine on one of his Dinner Impossible shows. I'm not sure if it was an act, but Robert seemed really pissed off at Guy.

I'd love to see both Gordon Ramsey and Robert Irvine on the same show, anyway.

[hifiguy]

12. That would be great television.

I remember that "Dinner Impossible" and I agree. Irvine has little patience with fools, and Fieri is a first class douche. And Irvine's a lot more tolerant than Ramsey.

Irvine could put Fieri in a headlock and pop his head like an overripe melon just by flexing his biceps.

[csziggy]

13. Restaurant Impossible + Kitchen Nightmares + World Wide Wrestling!

[Arugula Latte]

8. Guy should have named his restaurant "The Douchebag Cafe"

[hifiguy]

9. I was cracking up reading that review

in the Times yesterday. A truly world-class hammering. I can't stand Fieri anyway, and this was the icing on the cake.

[jmowreader]

11. What kind of sick asshole names a food item Donkey Sauce?

Yes, I know...but really, who would think this a good idea?

We are talking about the moran who came to the Spokane/Coeur d'Alene area and didn't do Dick's, didn't do The Elk and didn't do The Flying Goat - the three best dives in Spokane. Instead, he went to a sports bar and a breakfast place beloved by 70-year-old men. The sports bar has pizza but this pizza is unique: it is the only mom & pop pizza in America that's inferior to Domino's. He could have at least hit Hudson's, which would have taken five minutes because their menu is even shorter than the eatery in My Cousin Vinny: they have hamburgers. Period. But he didn't go there.

[hifiguy]

14. Keep your Donkey Sauce

I don't want anything excreted from a fking donkey.

[jmowreader]

15. I found out what Donkey Sauce actually is

It is mayo, yellow mustard, worcester sauce, salt & pepper. I guess you can't call it Jackass Sauce on teevee.