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Interstate-80 bridge across the Mississippi linking Illinois and Iowa.

This was taken on the Illinois side, from the Illinois Welcome Center.

Zz.

Guy Fieri's Time Square Restaurant Got Roasted By NY Times

I don't read many restaurant reviews. In fact, I don't recall when I last read one. But this one is a hoot and a half!

Now, I do love Guy Fieri's "Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives" on the Food Network. So when I came across a review of Fieri's new restaurant in NY City's Time Square called "Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar", I just had to read it. And man, was this restaurant got skewered big time!

Here are some of the highlights (or lowlights) in the review:

What exactly about a small salad with four or five miniature croutons makes Guy’s Famous Big Bite Caesar (a) big (b) famous or (c) Guy’s, in any meaningful sense?

When you have a second, Mr. Fieri, would you see what happened to the black bean and roasted squash soup we ordered?

Hey, did you try that blue drink, the one that glows like nuclear waste? The watermelon margarita? Any idea why it tastes like some combination of radiator fluid and formaldehyde?

At your five Johnny Garlic’s restaurants in California, if servers arrive with main courses and find that the appetizers haven’t been cleared yet, do they try to find space for the new plates next to the dirty ones? Or does that just happen in Times Square, where people are used to crowding?{ZapperZ: This, btw, is one of my big pet peeves when dining out}

How did Louisiana’s blackened, Cajun-spiced treatment turn into the ghostly nubs of unblackened, unspiced white meat in your Cajun Chicken Alfredo?

By the way, would you let our server know that when we asked for chai, he brought us a cup of hot water?

Tell me, though, why does your kitchen sabotage even its more appealing main courses with ruinous sides and sauces? Why stifle a pretty good bison meatloaf in a sugary brown glaze with no undertow of acid or spice? Why send a serviceable herb-stuffed rotisserie chicken to the table in the company of your insipid Rice-a-Roni variant?

Somewhere within the yawning, three-level interior of Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar, is there a long refrigerated tunnel that servers have to pass through to make sure that the French fries, already limp and oil-sogged, are also served cold?

Oh, and we never got our Vegas fries; would you mind telling the kitchen that we don’t need them?

Holy canolli, Batman! Those are awful reviews!

I  know! Maybe Guy could call Robert Irvine and do a Restaurant Impossible episode on his new restaurant! It sounds as if the restaurant needs an overhaul on the food and the service. Food Network will have a double-whammy for an episode since it will involve two of its stars!

Not gonna happen!

Zz.