And Guy Fieri boards one of those buses without reservation.įieri’s voice is a constant, low-grade bark that lies somewhere between a boom and a screech. One restaurant, Hillbilly Hot Dogs, comprises two remodeled school buses in Lesage, West Virginia. In fact, the more obscure the site, the happier he is. The premise is that Fieri is on an endless, nationwide restaurant crawl. Big, splashy primary colors abound the host drives a Camaro whose red is the reason that color TV exists. The world of the show is Technicolor majesty. The day I left my husband I devoted myself, with the single-minded purpose of a Talmud scholar, to the show that made Guy Fieri famous: Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives. I read this review the same night I stormed out of my husband’s house in tears, unable to pinpoint how, exactly, a box of fucking Texas Toasts had undone years of therapy, unable even to slam the door behind me, unable, really, to speak. In 2012, while I was supposedly poisoning my husband, Guy Fieri was doing the same to the husbands of Times Square. “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?” Any idea why it tastes like some combination of radiator fluid and formaldehyde?” “Hey, did you try that blue drink, the one that glows like nuclear waste?. “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?” It was less a review than a series of mean, pointed questions directed to the man himself: This review raised valid concerns about the restaurant’s poor quality and overambitious size, but what stuck with me was the sneer of it. I had no room for anything else.Ģ012 was also the year that Pete Wells’ famous New York Times review of Guy Fieri’s Times Square restaurant, Guy’s American, was published. He’d reduced the dimensions of my world to his height and weight. But at the time, as I squirmed and sobbed and begged him to please-please-please drop it, as I tried to walk away only to have my exit blocked at every turn, he was all I could see. How dull, to be mistreated in so predictable a way how dull I must have been to fall for it. His movie-villain behavior embarrasses me now. Not pulling it, just reminding me with his grip that it was his to pull if he needed to. He extracted from me the promise that I’d never ruin a meal like that again and, unsatisfied by my delivery, extracted it several more times, once while holding a fistful of my hair. I’d already missed it four times that month and was in danger of being kicked out of school, which would have forced us into a move we couldn’t afford. įinally, I had to beg him to let me attend my class. He simply preferred everything, including food, to be done correctly. But he resisted my claims that this made him a snob. He preferred rare steak, caviar could never resist a menu item whose cost was “Market Price.” In bars, he ordered top-shelf liquors, neat. My husband, a finicky eater, may not have liked frozen Texas Toast no matter what I’d done. I was still in college and had an evening class I needed to catch, but now I had a crime to answer for. Why must all my cooking be so sloppy? Did I intend to poison him? No? Then why did I insist on disappointing him? Instead, he said, “Your carelessness is unfortunate.” He then interrogated me for three hours about why I’d prepared these Toasts the way I had, the mistakes I had made. It was rarely my husband’s style to hit or scream. Inadequately, as it happens the edges of these Toasts were crisp and hot, but the middles were still damp the frost on them had melted and left them chilly. At the heart of this meal was a pair of frozen Texas Toasts, which I’d heated in the oven. One night in 2012, two years before I dared to leave, I made a meal for my husband and me.
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