So this is Flavortown. I’m at Guy Fieri’s house in Santa Rosa, California. The house is a relatively modest joint, as Guy Fieri places go. You’d never know it was his house. In fact, I drove right past it the first time, looking around instead for a five-story McMansion shaped like Sammy Hagar’s head. He bought the place in 1996, long before he became the Guy Fieri that all Food Network viewers know and some cherish. “When we bought this house,” he tells me, “everything was a shithole.”
It’s not a shithole anymore. Over the years, he’s gradually renovated and added a ton. He built a second house for his parents right next door. He bought a vineyard nearby, which is part of his brand-new wine business (and the reason GQ sent me here). He has two food trailers sitting in his backyard, one that houses a full-size Mugnaini pizza oven from Italy (“Burns at about 800 degrees—it’s pretty outrageous”) and one that houses a huli-huli rotisserie machine that can spit-roast 36 chickens at a time (“The chicken is—brother, lights out”). There are also two trampolines, a pool, a vegetable garden, a chicken coop…and Pops.
Lemme tell you about Pops, brother. Pops is the Fieri family tortoise. He’s a sulcata, the kind of lumbering beast you check out at the zoo because the tortoise exhibit is never crowded. Pops has his own pen on the property, although a massive hole in the wire is a stark reminder of all the times he has broken free (“We’ve had to hunt him down,” Guy says). And there’s an old, crusty hard hat sitting on the ground in the middle of the pen. The hard hat is Pops’s girlfriend. “He’ll hump that hard hat,” Guy tells me. “We’ll hear him. There must be a season or something, ’cos he gets goin’.”
What do you feed a tortoise?
“You know what his delicacy is?” Guy asks me, mischievously. “Hot, steamy, fresh dog shit. It is the foie gras of the turtle.”
And if you’re looking for a metaphor of how the food-and-wine establishment views Guy Fieri, it’s hard to top a man who feeds dog shit to slow-moving animals and calls it foie gras.
Guy Fieri makes wine now. His label is called Hunt & Ryde—named for his two sons, Hunter and Ryder—and this fall he will roll out three varietals, priced between $45 and $75 a bottle: a Pinot Noir, which he describes as a “bomb-ass Pinot,” a Cabernet blend, and a Zinfandel. He’s also preparing a sparkling rosé for next year, because “sparkling’s sexy. Everybody wants sparkling.”
And apart from a tiny “Guy” signature snuck onto the back label, which he says his colleagues and loved ones forced him to include, you’d never know that this was Guy Fieri product. There are no flame decals. No skulls. The Cabernet blend is not called KICKIN’ KAB. It won’t even be on the wine list at most Guy Fieri–branded restaurants. You'll probably only be able to get it at this website, which won't go live until sometime around Thanksgiving.
This is by design. Guy Fieri is no dummy. Despite the fact that his culinary empire has exploded—with formal involvement in 40 restaurants worldwide; three TV shows; five best-selling cookbooks, plus a sixth on the way; and a plum spot in every local grocery store’s condiment aisle—he knows that his name conjures a certain image, an image featuring many barbed-wire tattoos. “I just don’t want to distract from the greatness that’s going on,” he says, which is his immodest way of being modest about people’s expectations of his products.
For Fieri (it’s pronounced FEE-eddy), the winery is both a vanity project—”heirloom shit” that he can pass down to his children—and a somewhat risky toe dip into a fart-sniffing wine universe that, even on his home turf of Sonoma County, has not exactly been welcoming to him. Earlier this year, in order to move forward with plans to open a Hunt & Ryde–branded tasting room near his vineyard, Fieri and his team had to agree to 76 separate conditions from the county zoning board (the resulting document is one of those enormous NIMBY zoning applications that makes you groan the second you open the PDF). But the effort turned out to be futile. A public hearing was scheduled and more than a hundred people showed up to oppose it, some carrying placards that read “Keep Willowside Safe & Quiet: No to Guy Fieri.” One resident told the planning board that allowing the tasting room would be like “putting Disneyland in downtown Graton.” Noise studies were commissioned. Potential DUI arrest trends were studied with great intensity. Town-hall meetings were convened. Various objections were noted for the public record:
Neighbor Judy Tembrock: “The applicant has thought of everything except a place for his noise.”
Neighbor Joan Fleck: “This project will be detrimental to my health, welfare, and comfort.”
Neighbor Clay Jackson: “A race car was fired up next door by the applicant’s staff with no warning. The noise very nearly seriously injured one of my show horses. This has happened a couple of times.”
Neighbor Toni Kovatch-Mercer: “My family lived across the street from the applicant’s residence. Guests would be loud, leave trash, and trample landscaping. All we could do was sell and move.”
You get the idea. These people weren’t simply protesting Guy’s wine room. They were protesting Guy, and the trashy clientele they assumed would show up to drink his wine. The tasting-room proposal was rejected. Fieri lost.
It’s safe to say that this would not have happened if, say, Alice Waters had tried to do something similar. And that is why Fieri can’t put his famed mug on a $75 bottle of wine and expect discerning oenophiles to buy it. No, for the first time in his career, he has had to be discreet. No tasting room. No name on the front label. No obvious indicators that your bomb-ass Pinot was produced by one of the most derided chefs in America. Fieri is betting a great deal of time (and money) that the quality of his wine will speak for itself, and that people who would never drink a Guy Fieri wine will be pleasantly surprised when they discover that they just have.
And I’m his first guinea pig. I get to taste the wine a month before anyone else. Will it be delicious? Will it be terrible? Will it have ribbons of peanut butter in it? Can Guy Fieri overcome his own BODACIOUSNESS and shock everyone by making a subtle, classy wine?
Let’s get into these bold flavors and find out.
Every good wine comes with a backstory, and Guy Fieri’s starts at his home. When I arrive, Guy is in his standard uniform: camo shorts, loud shirt, flip-flops, jewel-encrusted skull necklace. He looks like every Sublime fan rolled into one. Underneath his shirt, he has a huge scar running up from his belly button, the result of a horse bucking him off and stomping on him when he was 10 years old. The crushing impact tore a ligament off of his liver and bruised his heart. His parents ("hippies," as Guy describes them) were backpacking around Europe at the time, so a lawyer had to sign a court order as their proxy so that Guy could get the emergency operation needed to salvage his guts. “I was fucked up,” he says. “My mom was devastated.” Somehow he survived, and he’s been a resilient fellow ever since.
Before Guy and I can talk wine, he needs to drive Ryder, who is 8, to school. Ryder gets to pick which of his father's cars we take, and he chooses the yellow Camaro, the one with the license plate that reads RYDERSS. Years from now, when Ryder learns to drive, this Camaro will be his, just as the license plate has foretold. (Fieri has many other cars, each with its own vanity plate: FOOD FYT, CADLAQ, LIVFAST, BLKTRFL, etc.) But for now, the younger Fieri sits in the back as his dad guns the engine (mind the horses, Guy!), blasts some sweet tunes (“I love everything from Enya to Pantera”), and guides us at top speed through to Ryder’s elementary school. It’s gotta feel pretty bawse to roll up to school in a Camaro. I bet the other kids shit their Minecraft undies at the sight of it.
On our way back from school, friends and well-wishers spot Guy driving the Camaro and honk and chat with him at red lights. Guy whips out an apple and eats it while driving. When we arrive at his house after the dropoff, his wife, Lori, is there to greet us. They’ve been married for more than twenty years. He met Lori after firing a friend of hers, and she went to angrily confront Guy about it. They got married. The friend stayed fired.
Lori immediately notices that the Camaro’s engine is smoking.
“Why is it overheating?” she asks Fieri. “You didn’t smell that at all on your way?”
“No,” he tells her.
“Yeah, that’s totally overheating.”
Guy grabs a nearby fire extinguisher and rushes to do a quick diagnostic check of the precious Camaro. “Nah, that’s the oil seal. The car rides kinda low; we nicked the pan.”
The Camaro is out of commission. Bummer. However, being Guy Fieri means always having an extra muscle car handy when all the other muscle cars are in the shop. Thus we trade in Ryder’s Camaro (yellow with a black racing stripe) for a Corvette (black with a yellow racing stripe). Lori heads off in her car to get the family dog vaccinated against rattlesnake venom. And then Guy and I ride off again, in a low-slung hot rod that was born to take on highway entrance ramps. “This is a fast motherfucker,” he says.
Now, this is the Guy Fieri you probably expected, right? The one you know about mainly from details that the Internet uses to scorn him: frosted blond hair that acts as a human flame decal; “Donkey sauce”; a dyed-blond soul patch nestled within a brown goatee; “Love, Peace & Taco Grease”; that TMZ video where Guy’s hairdresser calls him a “fucking asshole” over and over again (according to Guy, they are still best buds); and a succession of menu items that make every food blogger squeal with hateful delight. This is the guy who is the constant target of restaurant critics and fellow chefs. In November 2012, the New York Times food critic Pete Wells wrote a zero-star review of Fieri’s Manhattan restaurant, Guy’s American Kitchen and Bar, that was so scathing Fieri had to go on Today that week to defend himself.
Once Fieri and I arrive at the vineyard, I ask him if he ever read the review.
“Yeah, I read it cover to cover.”
Did you think it was fair?
“He could’ve made such a great comment. But he dropped down to third grade and said every mean, vile thing that he could say and discredited himself. Do I have faults in the restaurant? I have faults in the restaurant today! Everybody does. His assignment was to give me no stars. He had it already planned.”
(In response, Wells e-mailed me: “Nobody’s ever assigned me to give a restaurant a good review, a bad review, or any other kind of review. The Times doesn’t work that way, and I don’t work that way. The place had the same shot at earning a star or two that I’d give any other restaurant. The review tells you why it didn’t end up with one.”)
And then there’s Anthony Bourdain, who mocked Fieri on Twitter when his yellow Lamborghini was stolen—to be fair, that was pretty amusing—and toured the country this summer, doing a one-man show in which he cracked a few jokes at Fieri’s expense.
“It’s actually disappointing,” Fieri says when I tell him about Bourdain’s show. “I don’t like him making fun of people, and I don’t like him talking shit. And he’s never talked shit to my face. I know he’s definitely gotta have issues, ’cos the average person doesn’t behave that way. It’s not that I’m not open to the reality that the food world was like this from a few people’s perspective. It’s just, What are you doing? What is your instigation? You have nothing else to fucking worry about than if I have bleached hair or not? I mean, fuck.”
Bourdain, for his part, declined to comment for this story. And the interesting thing is that if you close your eyes and listen to Fieri speak, he doesn’t sound so different from the chefs and the foodies who so gleefully despise him. He composts. He hates soda. He doesn’t like hunting. He doesn’t even like fried food all that much (“As soon as you wanna take away the flavor of anything, just fry it”). Ask him about why he started an organic winery, and he’ll launch into a disquisition about how Europeans are so much more enlightened about alcohol consumption. He’ll talk about putting his hands in the soil and making a connection with THE LAND and keeping “lost arts” alive. Every fifth word out of his mouth is “sustainable.”
But his innate Fieri-ness, which he swears is not a deliberately maintained brand image, can get in the way of all that hifalutin talk. And it’s not just the frosted tips. It goes a little deeper than that, deep into the culture wars that have somehow managed to invade your dinner plate.
In 2011, Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives creator David Page was ousted by the Food Network and ended up suing them. Page accused Fieri of ogling boobs and being openly disgusted by gay restaurant proprietors. The claims were never substantiated, and the suit has long since been settled (but not before damaging e-mails from Page himself also became public; Page is no longer affiliated with the show). But you can see how that sort of news clip ends up permanently hitched to both Fieri’s reputation and the food he serves. That is the man local zoning boards abhor. That is the guy who’s seen as a threat to cheapen anything he touches. I ask Fieri, who has never spoken personally about the Page lawsuit, if he ever worried about it hurting his reputation.
“Oh, god, no. It was so fabricated that I didn’t even really address it. People called and asked me about it, and I said, ‘I can’t tell you anything other than it’s bullshit.’ ”
Around the time the lawsuit surfaced, Fieri’s sister, Morgan, was dying of melanoma (and here I crassly point out that Morgan was gay). Morgan had already beaten cancer at age 14. But it returned in her later years, and after she refused chemotherapy due to her belief in holistic treatments, the disease killed her at age 38.
To commemorate Morgan, Guy has a tattoo of her standing in a clamshell on his arm, modeled after Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. He holds out his arm for me to see.
“Losing my sister to cancer was… That was the worst thing in the world, man. I can’t even fucking… Nothing you can do about it except hold on, love your family, love your sister. Do people talk shit (about me)? Yes. And not that it doesn’t bother me, but you know what? I got so much bigger fuckin’ things goin’ on in this world.”
Were you angry when she passed away?
“Yeah. Angry. I was every emotion. I mean, it can’t be the end. There’s gotta be another union at some point in time. I’m not a religious person by any means. [But] I believe that there’s a lot more going on. Not voodoo-type shit, but something’s gotta be going on, man.”
Guy has another tattoo on his body, an illustration of the number one in Evel Knievel–style stars and stripes. And on the first case of his new wine, you’ll find that same decal on the side of the cork. The man has put his body into the bottle.
So let’s open one.
Three bulbous wine glasses sit before me in a tasting room: a Zin, a Cab blend (which is called TROPHY, with the O on the label replaced by a gun sight), and a Pinot Noir. Fieri vigorously swirls his own glass to aerate the wine, or as he says, “volatilize the esters.” Meanwhile, Fieri’s partner on the project, the well-respected local vintner Guy Davis (another Guy! Two guys!), is explaining to me how the wine was made in that highly technical, seemingly inexhaustible way that all winemakers talk about wine. I had no idea you could talk that much about wine.
Remember how I told you that Fieri’s name won’t be prominently displayed on these wines? Well, it’s not just to keep the wine snobs off of his ass. Turns out there’s a touch of snobbery here on Fieri’s part as well. These are limited cases. He doesn’t want anyone drinking his wine thoughtlessly, and that goes for Food Network fanboys, too.
“I don’t want it to be a great wine because a bunch of fans say, Oh, we like Guy Fieri,” he tells me. “This isn’t juice that somebody else made that we just put in a bottle and put my name on it, which a lot of people do.”
“Greg Norman, the golfer,” Davis points out as an example.
“Yeah,” says Fieri. “It’d just be too much about me, not about the wine. The wine will speak for itself. I want it to be appreciated. If all the hard work got shadowed by ‘It’s a celebrity wine,’ then that to me is a real disappointment.”
Ah, but I know it’s his. I’m standing here now, with Fieri right next to me, as I raise these glasses and attempt to taste these wines properly. All of them are light and peppery. Thin, even—more like Italian wines than big French wines. No peanut butter ribbons, although such a thing would intrigue me. At first I like the cheapest wine—the Zinfandel—but not the other two. The Cab blend, in particular, seems to have a bitter aftertaste.
But I keep drinking, because I don’t trust my rookie wine palate (the next over-$20 bottle of wine I purchase will be my first) and because FREE WINE. And as I shuttle between glasses and take a bite of cheese here and there (lots of cheese, actually; at one point Fieri declares, “There’s a cow with a dry teat right now”), my opinion shifts. Wait, maybe now I like this Cabernet. Or was that the Pinot I just had? Am I shit-faced? Yes, I am shit-faced. These wines seem to have depth. Or do they? What kind of baggage am I bringing to my senses here? Am I just bullshitting myself because I’m doing this in front of Guy and I genuinely like him? After all, wine is about good company, and I gotta tell you that Guy Fieri is very good company. Also, I am drinking these wines early in their lifespan. Davis tells me the Pinot will “put on a little more mouth-coat” in the coming months. Maybe I don’t have enough mouth-coat yet to taste the truth. I am no oenophile—far from it—but I do know that these wines didn't taste out of place compared to the other Sonoma wineries I visited.
Whether or not wine freaks will fawn over Hunt & Ryde remains unclear. That’s why there’s that tiny signature on the back of the bottles. It’s a small bid to have it both ways: Fieri gets a few choice snobs and a few choice fans all giving it a shot in unison. He is blending his audience. And he’s doing it because this wine matters to him more than anything else he’s ever done. When I ask Fieri if the potential failure of Hunt & Ryde would hurt him more than, say, a barbecue sauce that flops, he doesn’t hesitate: “Oh, yeah.” This is personal.
We’re back at the Fieri house now, out on the patio. Guy is grilling (and chilling!) in the back, along with his parents, Jim and Penny; his wife; and his sons.
Guy notices that Hunter’s pants are sagging.
“Pull your pants up,” Guy tells his son. “What’s goin’ on with your pants?”
“Hey, the belt sucks,” Hunter says.
“Looks like you got a big old milker in there.”
Meanwhile, Guy is making chicken, lobster tails, and a couple of vegetable dishes on another big outdoor grill. The man’s life is one endless tailgate. Fieri rarely dines out for pleasure. He prefers to cook at home or eat at his own restaurants (“I love going to Tex Wasabi’s”). He is his own ideal customer—a man in love with his own middlebrow food.
Guy takes a pan filled with blanched asparagus and drops a HUGE chunk of brie in it. The most brie. All of the brie. And some bacon. You know, for flavor. Did I eat it? I did. Was it good? Of course it was. Is this transcendent food? No, but it wasn't meant to be. Guy Fieri isn’t capable of making high-end cuisine and has zero interest in trying. That’s why he wanted Davis’s help in this wine venture: to help see and taste things in the wine that he personally cannot.
This is a brief family respite for Fieri, who has to go to Atlanta early the next morning to resume his relentless taping schedule for the Food Network. Then on Saturday he’ll go to a horse race with Papa John. And Jimmy John. Both of the Johns.
Guy’s mom, Penny, looks confused. “Is he Jimmy’s dad?”
Wardrobe Stylist: Micah Bishop; Prop Stylist: James Whitney at Artist Untied
We’re all soaking up the sun in the idyllic Sonoma countryside, where everyone is happy, the grapes are fat, the Corvettes are safe, and the turtles are sexually satisfied. This is Hunt & Ryde, and this is what Guy Fieri wants people to understand about Guy Fieri. He wants them to forget that first bitter swig and dive in deeper, to move past their preconceived notions and give them a little taste of what he believes is the real him: his family, his history, his sweet rides… the terroir of Fieri. He wants there to be facets, complexity. He wants all of it to linger. He wants you to find the foie gras in the dog shit.
And then he wants you to come back for seconds.