REBLOGGED FROM: NY TIMES REVIEW BY PETE WELLS
As Not Seen on TV
Restaurant Review: Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar in Times Square
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
“DO YOU REALLY WANT TO KNOW WHAT’S IN HERE‽‽‽‽‽”
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?
“DUDE! ARE YOU YANKIN’ MY CHAIN, OR WHAT‽‽‽‽”
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.
Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar
“SAY WHAT‽‽‽‽‽”
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 Jalapeño 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.
Hmmmm… I wonder if I know anybody who could check this out and see how true it really is… (?eg?)!!!
Check out the 1024 comments (or at least a few of them at the NY TIMES
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Reblogged this on The ObamaCrat.Com™ and commented:
I think Mr. Guy Fieri is a joke. I have tasted 1st hand the food served at a3 of his restaurants and been disappointed 3 times in service and taste as well as food quality. In my UNhumble opinion, no human alive can manage/run more than 2 restaurants successfully. It takes way too much attention to detail to manage/run more than 2 at a time.
While I am ranting/venting….Food Network used to be a good network for learning how to cook and good cooking techniques. Now the Food Network has become a reality TV cooking competition garbage can.
LOL!!! JB, you hit it out of the park, dude!!! this is like purgatory for the wanna be TV stars who just don’t/can’t quite make the cut!!!
And, I agree about running so many restaurants, too… if you read Guy’s reply, he insists he is a “hands on” manger and everything has his stamp of approval. That’s not quite the right thing to say, Guy!!
Thanks for stopping by, commenting AND reblogging!!! Much appreciated!!
Jueseppi is right about the current programming. Food network is where all the game shows went to die…and no one has bothered to call the health department.
Celebrity restaurants almost invariably bite. I learned by lesson when someone brought Bobby Flay food for a function. With more than half of the guests soured before the end of the meal, most of it was wasted…and the bill was atrocious.
xxx
OH man, Bobby is one of my heroes – how he goes around the country and takes on the local experts at any dish – indeed someone should fry his brain and call it Fried Flay. Sounds good, eh‽‽‽‽
thanks for stopping in and sharing the outrageous with us!!
My darling, from the footage I have seen, he is already fried before they bother to turn on the camera.
Good one, Red!!!!!
SyFy hasn’t been the same since they stopped doing original shows. Now if they want to run bad movies, how about showing some good bad movies, like Godzilla or Plan 9 from Outer Space?
Oh yes! I sure miss those days of Stargate SG-1, and all the other old faves!! All that was before some kid bought the channel (just guessing) and renamed it from SciFi to SyFy!!! What a waste of a perfectly good cable channel!
Thanks rumpydog for barking in on this one!!
Funny! Another place I probably won’t be able to afford to eat at anyways, nor will probably care to.
Food Network is dead! Killed by mediocrity in the wake of the deaths of History Channel (minus H2 and other related channels that actually show history), Animal Planet, Court TV, and See Fee (SYFY).
Thanks, Heretic! That was truly my thought – can’t afford and don’t care!!! WHAT – no more HISTORY channel‽‽‽ SeeFee – that’s GOOD!!!
Most of what gets played on History Channel is basically reality show type of things like Pawn Stars, Ice Road Truckers, American Pickers, or whatever disaster they can dream up for everyone else’s Unhappy Meal to make people worried for no reason. H2 actually shows history shows, but if you have a basic subscription you are stuck watching the crap.
Fortunately, I can still afford the next step up from Basic, so do get the pleasure of H2 and Science and the like… though I admit to a craving for InvestigationDiscovery frequently, mostly because at times even H2 and Science, NatGeo, etc have nothing worthwhile…
hard to admit I have this baser side, but ID is better than say, Chopped‽‽‽‽
ID is cool, my favorite show on Science is the (I think) Stephen Hawking show about the different Sci-Fi writers.
Anything is better than Chopped. I miss Forensics Files, the reruns are OK, but wish it would’ve kept going.
yeah…. they are even creating some pretty good new programming themselves… it’s good to see some of those same old cases from a different perspective. I must say, I liked the Werner Herzog film on Death Row Inmates – quite good.
The best time to find forensic type shows is 4AM – 9AM CST (I follow strange hours)!!
Going with Red and Jueseppi on this one, can’t even watch the Food Network anymore it is a running joke. Though I must say, last time I was in Vegas I ate at a wonderful place that was a ‘name’ restaurant and it was a great experience. I will have to try to figure out which one.
Do let us know whose it was, Val… I’m very curious, indeed! I think the current most awful food news is the demise of Hostess, makers of the beloved Twinkies, DingDongs and the beloved Chocalate Cupcakes. Are all the good things in life either really bad for us or just plain bad!?!?!?
Damn I thought there would be some Wonder Bread reviews here…..haha
no… that came later… Sorry to disappoint… do you even have The Food Network down there?
At the very bottom, just above the comments are a few cool Wonder Bread links… or did I put all these in a comment on your blog!?!?!?
I must need me some Wonder Bread!! I’m soooo confused!!! Thanks for stopping by, anyway!!!
Love the reviews. Can you do some in Cincinnati so I know where not to eat?
I’ll try… haven’t been there ever (in 6+ decades), so I suggest you not wait for your next meal until I do!!!
