When I read the New York Times' hilariously smart-mouthed review of Guy Fieri's new Times Square restaurant, Guy's American Kitchen and Bar, I couldn't believe that a culinary experience could be so spectacularly frightful. Was the food really as "limp" and "oil-sogged" as the critic Pete Wells claimed? Did the drinks really taste like "a combination of radiator fluid and formaldehyde"? Did Fieri's spiky, bleached hair and Pauly Shore-turned-youth pastor personality inspire so much ire in the Gray Lady's reviewer that he could no longer separate the man from his food? Surely this place can't be worse than your average TGI Friday's. Or could it? I had to find out.
I wasn't alone. Wells's review was so popular--it's the most read story on the Times' website this month and it generated so much controversy that Fieri had to defend his reputation on the Today show--that the restaurant has started drawing a crowd. Of locals.