Guy Fieri admits being a frustrated, wannabe rock star. But he can’t sing and he doesn’t play any instruments. Lucky for him, celebrity chefs are the new rock stars.
“I don’t play guitar; I play the griddle,” he says.
But Fieri has found a way to incorporate the trappings of a rock show into his roof-raising touring production, the Guy Fieri Food Show. “There’s a lot of moving parts—a lot of music, a lot of food, a lot of interaction with the audience,” he says. “It’s kind of like a food-a-palooza.”
You’d expect nothing less from Fieri, a fireball of energy and enthusiasm whose Food Network shows includeGuy’s Big Bite; Diners, Drive-ins and Dives; and Tailgate Warriors. He also guest-judges on the show that made him famous, The Next Food Network Star, and hosts an NBC game show, Minute to Win It.
In his—ahem—spare time over the past couple of years, Fieri has written his own cookbook, Guy Fieri Food: Cookin' It, Livin' It, Lovin' It, which is the centerpiece of his current tour.
“The book is a monster,” Fieri says. “[It’s] over 400 pages, over 150 recipes, and it is basically everything up to now in my life of food: when I started as a kid to where I’m at now, going through the Food Network, opening my restaurant. So you got recipes from all different eras of my life. So it’s kind of like catching up. It’s all the stuff I wanted to do in the last 30 years...and I finally put it in a book.”
Fieri—it’s pronounced “fee-ed-ee” – showed an interest in the food business as early as age 10, when he began selling soft pretzels from a three-wheeled bike constructed with help from his father. His California-dude persona must have been in place even then: He called his venture “The Awesome Pretzel.”
“I was lucky,” Fieri says. “I was 10 years old and I realized I knew what my motivation was: It was food. It was always food.”
He studied abroad as an exchange student in France and took a degree in hospitality management from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. With his business partner, Steve Gruber, Fieri launched two restaurants, Johnny Garlic’s and Tex Wasabi’s. Both have multiple locations in California.
When TV stardom came calling, Fieri didn’t just answer the door—he ripped it off the hinges. He won The Next Food Network Star competition in 2006, in no small part due to his outsize personality, spiky bleached-blonde hair and wraparound shades. His Diners, Drive-ins and Dives show—which he refers to as “Triple D” for short—has been especially successful and has yielded two best-selling companion books.
Not everybody loves Fieri, though, and some see the majority of what he does as shtick. “I honestly don’t know how Guy Fieri gets out of bed in the morning and faces what he has to do for a living,” No Reservations star Anthony Bourdain told us in an interview last year. “Better him than me.”
But listen to Fieri talk for a few minutes and it's impossible not to get caught up in his love of—or let’s just say obsession with—food.
“Someone asked me, ‘How do you come up with all [these recipes]?'" Fieri says. “To be honest with you, I look at a basketball laying on the ground, and it makes me think of something—popcorn ball. How about a spicy popcorn ball? That’s how my mind’s always working.”
And apparently it’s tough to turn off. Fieri describes a recent vacation with his family where he cooked every meal. “And my wife’s like, ‘You’re not supposed to go on vacation and gain weight,’" he says. “She goes, ‘Aren’t you going back to work soon?’"
“And it’s not that it’s all fatty food or anything,” he continues. “It’s just that I like to make seven items for dinner. I mean, doesn’t everybody like seven items for dinner? You’re making ribs and you have egg rolls right next to it and then you’ve got carbonara, and she goes, ‘There’s no theme here.’"
“I said, ‘The theme is ‘delicious.’' But that’s my playground."
The Guy Fieri Food Show will be held at 8 p.m. Sunday, May 29, at the Blanche M. Touhill Performing Arts Center. Tickets are $35 to $250. Call 314-516-4949 to reserve seats or click here. Also on Sunday, Fieri will sign copies of Guy Fieri Food from noon to 1 p.m. at the downtown location of Left Bank Books, 321 N. 10th. Tickets—which include a signed copy of the book, a brief meeting with Fieri, and a photo taken with him (downloadable after the event)—are $29.95. Call 314-367-6731 for tickets to this event or click here.
