i'm ryan sutton, the new york food critic for bloomberg news.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
You know you’ve had dinner at Masa, America’s most expensive restaurant, when your credit card company sends you a fraud alert. Shout out to Next Food Network Star & Do or Dine chef Justin Warner for tweeting us this screenshot. Dinner for two at the sushi spot, after tax & 20% tip, starts at $1,160. So all things considered, Mr. Warner got off pretty easy.
We present this quote from Guy Fieri’s website without comment, because, yeah.
Guy Fieri may represent something culinarily unsophisticated and lowbrow…but nevertheless his beat has always been the authentic, the human, the real. And what Wells does is locate Fieri’s restaurant (which, let’s be honest, nobody ever actually expected to be any good) within the larger sphere of Fieri’s universe. This isn’t a restaurant review, it’s a referendum on Fieri himself, a man whose brand was built on his unreserved praise for food and people deserving of that praise, and who in entering the arena himself revealed a hollowness that threatens to undermine everything he’s done.
Helen Rosner deserves a Pulitzer Prize for explaining exactly why NYT critic Pete Wells had to take down Guy Fieri’s debut NYC restaurant. What we have here is an irony play, Rosner explains. Fieri, the man behind “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives,” a television show that champions small neighborhood spots you’ve never heard of, is undermining his authenticity with a 500-seat Times Square restaurant that serves $23 meatloaf to the masses.
