Guy Fieri is a master of traditional, hearty American food. Diner, drive-in and dive fare.
But some of his recipes don't make the cut when it comes to top-notch cuisine.
Here are some of the Guy Fieri signature dishes you should probably watch out for and avoid.
Dessert pizza is definitely a thing, and a s'mores pizza when done right can be delicious.
"No campfire needed for this baby."
But not for Guy Fieri, who decided to make a s'mores pizza using actual pizza dough,
because who doesn't want savory — not sweet — pizza dough paired with marshmallows?
This recipe is an unholy mess, taking two food items that are delicious and ruining them by
combining them together. There's also no way that this doesn't dry out the second it cools,
because the pizza has no sauce. Marshmallow and dark chocolate will be moist and runny fresh
out of the oven, but it will congeal and harden pretty quickly. Hard, dry marshmallow on top of
a dry pizza crust? No thanks! Guy also decides to get fancy with sea salt, cayenne pepper,
and dark chocolate, but dude, it's a s'mores pizza. This isn't a pastry shop.
Most of Guy Fieri's cocktail recipes are kitschy but respectable, but this blue
nightmare is where he goes over the line. Fieri starts out on the wrong foot by recommending
two ounces of a lemon-flavored rum. Why not just add a little squeeze of lemon and use good rum?
The recipe continues with a quarter-ounce sweet blue liqueur, and then a quarter-ounce of sweet
and sour mix. At this point, your teeth and your stomach should be angry at the coming onslaught
of sugar, acid, and booze. But wait! Add two ounces each of pineapple and grapefruit juice,
two flavors that will want to duke it out in your mouth with nasty results. Add some shaved ice,
and then garnish it with a maraschino cherry, something that should only top a Shirley
Temple. After you've assembled your Electric Ice, grab some Advil for the morning after.
Guy Fieri is good at basic American cooking, and what's more basic than meatloaf? Nothing,
which is why this cornbread-stuffed meatloaf recipe is so infuriating.
Guy Fieri could make a really good meatloaf, but instead,
he decides to give us a weird, Franken-meatloaf that goes for decadence instead of common sense.
The first ingredient for the stuffing is, quote, "two large or five small corn muffins." There is
no recipe for said corn muffins, so can we suppose that any old corn muffin will do?
What's worse, the meatloaf portion of this recipe looks extremely dry. There's very little liquid
in this recipe, and most of the negative reviews mention that the meatloaf isn't as moist as many
wish it would be. The only moisture comes from the meat, olive oil, eggs, ketchup, and Worcestershire
sauce. Compare that to Ina Garten's flawless meatloaf recipe, which in addition to all that
has a third of a cup of chicken stock. You need a little stock or broth in meatloaf.
Regardless of the traditional egg roll's origins, we can all agree that a Philly
cheesesteak egg roll is essentially just a deep-fried Philly cheesesteak.
This is another Guy Fieri culinary mashup that no one asked for, and it seems greasy as hell.
The filling of Guy Fieri's egg roll is also arguably not a Philly cheesesteak.
Fieri uses pepper jack cheese instead of the traditional American or Provolone,
and roast beef instead of, you know, steak. If you change the cheese and you don't use steak,
and then you wrap it up in an egg roll, can you even call it a cheesesteak?
On the basis of the name alone, Guy Fieri deserves a demerit for
using his name in a bad pun. But look a little closer at these Guy-talian Nachos,
and you'll see it's another messy mashup in Flavortown. These aren't really nachos,
and this isn't an Italian dish, and it's a big, greasy, overstuffed mess.
It's Frankenstein's monster, come to life as an unholy combo of nachos, wontons, and antipasto.
"So I said, what would make an Italian nacho? Well, how about some pasta? Well,
pasta could also be a wonton. A wonton is pasta."
The whole recipe is too clever for its own good. Instead of chips, use wonton wrappers!
Instead of salsa, make "Italian salsa," whatever that means. These nachos will
definitely take you to Flavortown, but it might be a bad trip. There's a lot going on,
something is deep-fried, there are three different kinds of meat, and it's all too much.
Haluski is comfort food that can be claimed by the Polish,
Slovaks, Ukrainians, and Hungarians that consists of egg noodles or potato dumplings
mixed with cabbage, onions, sheep or goat cheese, and pork. Haluski varies
from region to region, but it essentially is an easy-to-make dish with simple ingredients.
Fieri's recipe adds capers, peas, parsley, white wine, lemon juice,
thyme, and carrots. Fieri also opts for thinly sliced pancetta instead of the more
humble bacon you might find in a bowl of haluski in a diner in Pennsylvania.
The addition of so many ingredients may not seem like such a big deal, but this is home
cooking comfort food we're talking about. It might be nice, but it's not real haluski.
Guy Fieri has some pretty legit fried chicken recipes out there.
That's why his awesome pretzel chicken tenders recipe is so weird and disappointing.
The central conceit of the pretzel-ness of these tenders comes from the fact that part
of the coating for the chicken tenders includes crushed-up pretzels. Crushed-up pretzels taste
like breadcrumbs. And so the instructions in the recipe say "large breadcrumbs"
to preserve some pretzel flavor, except that large breadcrumbs will not stick to chicken.
Most of the negative reviews mention that the coating was either flavorless or didn't stick.
This seems like a recipe that just may not work for home cooks,
but in a Food Network universe that requires more and more content and novelty, this so-called
"easy" recipe leads a bunch of Guy Fieri fans to fruitlessly smash a bunch of pretzels.
Guy Fieri has become infamous in certain circles for his donkey sauce,
which is his trademarked version of aioli with a Flavortown-appropriate name,
but that's not his only signature sauce. There are lots of “special sauces” out there in the
food world, from In-n-Out to McDonald's, that are basically just Thousand Island dressing,
so it makes sense that Fieri would get around to making his own one day.
The problem is that reading his special sauce recipe is more of a WTF journey than a bus
straight to Flavortown. It starts out sounding like a pretty standard special sauce recipe,
then it starts to just sound gross. Two cups of mayo, a half-cup of ketchup, and a quarter cup
of yellow mustard all together? And this can be used as a dip, apparently, as well as a sauce?
To add insult to injury, the last ingredient is two tablespoons of water, despite the fact
a slightly watery mayonnaise-based dip is appetizing to no one, ever.
Guy Fieri, being Guy Fieri, looked at a traditional, crowd-pleasing greasy recipe
like fried cheese and thought, how can I make this into an egg roll and add meat to it?
And thus the "I've Got the Need, the Need for Fried Cheese!" was born,
a recipe that manages to contain both a "Top Gun" reference and an exclamation point in the title.
This is another deep-fried culinary mashup that begs the question,
"Why?" It's like a deep-fried cupcake at a state fair. This recipe involves a fried
piece of string cheese wrapped in salami, which is then wrapped in an egg roll. It tastes like
a delicious heart attack, and it seems like the invention of a stoned short-order cook.
Do we really need a recipe for this? As for the dipping sauce, the only guidance is:
marinara sauce. Just get a jar. You're eating fried cheese, so store-bought sauce is fine.
To be fair to the Mayor of Flavortown, the actual recipe for these so-called trash can nachos
looks pretty amazing. His so-called super melty cheese (SMC for short) mixture of half and half,
Velveeta, smoked gouda, white cheddar, Worcestershire sauce, and Tabasco
is pure genius. Including smoked brisket and pickled red onions is also a very classy touch.
So why is this delicious nachos recipe on this list? For one, the unappealing name. We
are humans, not raccoons, right? And for another thing, the method of presentation is grotesque,
reminiscent of the weirdest viral food video you've ever seen on TikTok.
At Guy Fieri's Vegas Kitchen, the server brings a plate with a mini trash can of nachos to the
table, pulls the trash can away, and voila! A tower of wet, kind of-congealed nachos,
with nary a dry chip in sight. A video of the un-trashcanning went viral on Twitter,
and while some people thought it looked amazing, others just couldn't stomach even the sight of it.
Fieri debuted the trashcan method at the South Beach Wine & Food Festival in 2015,
making what looks like some very wet, cheesy nachos in an
actual trashcan because, according to the Food Network's blog about the event,
the trashcan was the only thing large enough to hold all the nachos.
Guy Fieri has more than one chili recipe, but his dragon's breath chili recipe
is the kind of chili that you bring to a chili cook-off if you want to win. It's hot,
it's spicy, and it's not for the faint of heart. It's a really good recipe! So why
is it in the hall of shame? Because Guy Fieri, like many other celebrity chefs,
seems to not know how long it takes to caramelize onions. The recipe says to add
the onions and cook until caramelized, which the recipe also claims takes "about five minutes."
Onions do not caramelize in five minutes. They start to caramelize after 25.
In Guy Fieri's defense, he isn't the only chef who does this. Many other celebrity chefs have
committed this sin too, and it's very misleading. If you're going to make this chili, give yourself
a lot more time to caramelize your onions, and roast and peel your peppers the day before.
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