Today Guy Fieri released his new book Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives: The Funky Finds in Flavortown. This travel guide/recipe book is more or less what you’d expect from the human embodiment of an Ed Hardy shirt: it’s full of bad jokes and backhanded compliments (he calls a favorite milkshake in Chicago “[a] poor man’s milk shake”), and a major theme is the Food Network personality’s strange fixation on Kid Rock. Fieri’s usual flamboyance is a bit muted in this book, however, and there are a couple of occasions where it seems like he almost wants you to take him seriously. He frequently refers to his time studying in Chantilly, France, and reveals he “was raised in a really big art community” on the same page where he commissions the owner of a Kansas City pizza place to construct “a twenty-five-gallon margarita machine.” It’s clearly only a matter of time before Michelin takes notice, but until then, enjoy the rest of book’s most ridiculous passages.
1. “[Those] fried green tomatoes, brother that’s a symposium of flavor.”
2. “Sometimes you pull up to a place and you just know it’s going to be good. Well, as I pulled up to Martin’s my phone rang, and it was Kid Rock’s manager telling me that Kid Rock wanted to talk about Triple D. (We rapped for about a half an hour and subsequently did the Kid Rock Triple D special.) Then I walked into the barbecue joint and met a sunburned fan who had been waiting for me all day. Next we got to chop some wood — I believe they had a Jack Daniel’s-handled splitting maul — light a big smoker, and barbecue a whole hog. If they’d thrown in a little ice cold beer and some Hank Williams Junior, I might not have left — ever.”
3. “Don’t ever use lighter fluid — it’s un-American. Amateurs, losers, and idiots use lighter fluid. If you’ve bought this book, you are inherently none of those three things, so let’s make sure to teach others the correct way that real pitmasters start a fire. Lighter fluid makes your food taste like crap and is bad for the environment.”
4. “[Splash] some [rub] around the rest of the hog for good measure. This really doesn’t do a dang thing, but it makes you feel good about things and makes for good drama.”
5. “Shut the front door, son of Tatum O’Neal, that’s dynamite.”
6. “[On] the final leg of the Kid Rock culinary cruise, we ended up at the brewery where Kid Rock made Badass Beer. Now if you’re going to call it Badass beer it better be badass, and all I can tell you is the name fits the bill. Just like his music, the dude delivers. Not one to stray far from his roots or waver on his stance to do good for the city of Detroit, when Kid Rock’s Badass producer unexpectedly closed shop in 2012, Rock knew what to do: build a world-class brewery in the heart of the city staffed by Detroiters and supporting Detroit. Opening Summer 2013. Badass Beer: Trouble Has Been Brewed.”
7. “The name of my competition BBQ team is Motley Cue, so Stretch took my logo, which is tattooed on my arm, and cut it out of metal — then brought it down to my team. We became instant buddies. Then he came out to my birthday with a watermelon catapult… that began the crazy life of Stretch and Guy. When we prepared to do the Guy Fieri Road Show, I asked him if he could construct a twenty-five-gallon margarita machine.”
8. “At Big Mama’s Kitchen it’s all right ear, right now… or it could been the left ear… one of the most talked about bites, seen across the world is the floppy wonder (can you “ear” what I’m saying’?): the pig ear sandwich. I thought I was gonna die, but I gotta tell ya, it wasn’t as bad as you might think.”
9. “[The] Parmageddon [has] pierogi, kraut, and sharp cheddar, and then it goes into the meltification machine — it’s outta bounds and so much more than a grilled cheese sandwich.”
10. “This patio goes off the hook — I think the folks are in a Flavortown food coma.”
11. “Chef Matt says, ‘Get jiggy with it, have some fun!'”
12. “One night I was at Mama Cozza’s having dinner with my family, and I’d really not been feeling well all week…one of [the chef’s] daughters-in-law drove me to this doctor’s office at 11 pm…and I was better the next day. We call that kulinary gangsta alla Mama Cozza!”
13. “People who like [haggis] call it spicy, creamy, rich, and buttery — I don’t wanna tell you what I call it… ha ha.”
14. “My favorite line: ‘Do you get any tater with that gator? James Spader likes gator.’ (Ha ha ha, I kill me.)”
15. “It was a lightning bolt of an idea in Flavortown that pranked the un-prankable mayor, Guy Fieri.”
16. “I don’t know if it’s fair to call their Russian dressing Russian dressing — it should be called something sexy, like liquid Moscow.”
17. “I lay claim to the knuckle sandwich… it’s my brand, my logo, hell, even my tattoo, so when I find out that two dudes in Austin have opened up a sandwich joint and one of their menu items is the knuckle sandwich, I tell you what, they’d better deliver the real deal. (jk.)”
18. “His seafood is so fresh it’ll slap ya.”
19. “I sucked at making my Yorkshire pudding before getting schooled by Anne. Now they’re puffy McMagic, not flat McTragic.)… She could feed me beef six ways to Sunday.”
20. “[They] make a porchetta that you won’t forgetta.”