Las Vegas is a city whose attractions feature the eat-at-your-own-risk Heart Attack Grill. It’s also got no shortage of vast, empty spaces waiting to be filled. So it would have seemed inevitable had Guy Fieri chosen to open a three-story, 500-seat (!) temple to junk food in Sin City rather than Times Square. Local food critics are so starstruck they’d undoubtedly have waxed rhapsodic over Fieri’s “Donkey Sauce” and “Malibu Oysters.” However, it was Fieri’s misfortune to erect Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar in New York City, not on the Las Vegas Strip. This earned him a royal roasting from New York Times food critic Pete Wells: “How did Louisiana’s blackened, Cajun-spiced treatment turn into the ghostly nubs of unblackened, unspiced white meat in your Cajun Chicken Alfredo?” Wells expounded the thinking behind his review even further to Poynter.
However, such is the power (read: money) commanded by Fieri that the Times‘ public editor called Wells on the carpet to explain himself. What’s more, Fieri hopped a readeye from The Coast and apparently demanded (successfully) that NBC News send Savannah Guthrie on an immediate pilgrimage to Guy’s American Kitchen and provide him with a soapbox. (With Today losing the morning-ratings battle, who was NBC to refuse?) Fieri’s complaint about the Times having an “agenda” doesn’t wash: Wells paid the restaurant four visits, rather than his customary three, which suggests a backward-bending effort to be fair. Also, how much quality control does Fieri really think can be exerted at a restaurant which might be serving as many as 500 diners at a time? Fieri’s fiery blast may have backfired: The New York Observer was quick to double down on the rhetoric (“a massive and multilevel exercise in megalomania”). However, Guy’s American Kitchen might be just the thing to put foot traffic back into Crystals or Palazzo Shoppes. Casino owners here don’t seem to care much what food you serve or whether it’s any good, just so long as there’s a celebrity name up front. How else does one explain the ubiquity of Wolfgang Puck, the Ronald McDonald of fine dining?
Don’t know much about Wolfgang’s Vegas outposts, but his D.C. place, “The Source” down at the Newseum, is quite nice.
Almost ready to agree on Wolfgang Puck, but the dinner I had at Spago a few years back was the best I ever had, by a lot.
David, have you eaten at Cut, or Spago, or even the Bar & Grill? Not exactly Ronald McDonald.
As to the Times review, I think Guy’s getting the last laugh … lots of other reviewers have now gone there and basically said that 1) Wells is full of shit and 2) when are his reviews of Macaroni Grill and Hard Rock Cafe going up, since that’s the demo for this restaurant.