The Trailer Park Gourmet

Courtesy of Food Network Guy Fieri has become the Food Network's biggest star, while offending foodies by promoting lowbrow favorites like BBQ sushi. He talks to Rachel Syme about taking on the haters.

Next Tuesday night, Food Network personality Guy Fieri, 41, will step onto a $170,000 stage in a custom-made black leather chef's coat and use a 6-foot-tall blender to make 25 gallons of margaritas in two minutes. Fieri plans to get a cocktail to each member of the 2,800-person audience in the Lowell Memorial Auditorium in Massachusetts' Merrimack Valley, where he kicks off his 22-city national “rock 'n' roll meets culinary” tour.

“Oh, hell, yeah!” he says, when asked if the margaritas are intended for crowd consumption. “I'd actually like the tickets to read that the prerequisite for my show is tailgating. It's going to get crazy. I'm ADD on stage, you see. Well, not clinically. But I've got 60,000 things going on at the same time. I love this move where I deglaze a pan with alcohol, and flames shoot up. They won't let me do real pyrotechnics in the show—it's not like Metallica concert where fans are standing by—but there will be surprises. I have a T-shirt cannon. Can't really do a rock show without a T-shirt cannon.”

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Fieri (pronounced Fi-et-ti) is a breathless speaker, exuding an aggressive pep that can border on the manic. It may be a survival technique, given his increasingly grueling media schedule. In addition to his three shows on the Food Network (the pre-taped cooking program Guy's Big Bite, the cross-country eating tour Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives, and the live studio show Guy Off the Hook), Fieri is embarking on his national tour (in a bus stocked with Pabst Blue Ribbon and painted with flames), promoting his second book (More Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives), pushing his new “Knuckle Sandwich” brand of knives and cookwear, and hosting a syndicated radio show (Food Guy and Marcy).

Though Fieri has been working in food for more than a decade—the native Californian majored in hospitality management at UNLV in 1990 and owns five restaurants, including the odd BBQ-sushi experiment Tex Wasabi's—he came into the Food Network family in 2006, when he won Season 2 of the reality competition The Next Food Network Star. In just three years, he has become the channel's most promising cash cow and trademark male face. He now travels with a bodyguard to events, has bras and underwear thrown at him during cooking demos, and counts Sammy Hagar and members of AC/DC as close friends—no wonder he speaks about himself in rock-star language.

Fieri's meteoric ascent is impressive, but it also makes him one of the culinary world's most polarizing figures. For as many fans as Fieri earns—Dora Long, the creator of Fieri's biggest fan site, says she gets “hundreds of emails a week”—he draws equal detractors. Like Rachael Ray or Emeril Lagasse, Fieri is a food personality who has rapidly outgrown the food, walking the narrow line between technique and celebrity that makes so many in the industry nervous. His recipes have names like “No Can Beato This Taquito,” and “Mac-Daddi-Roni Salad,” and he often effuses about the greasy meals he eats on Diners, Drive-Ins and Drives with his mouth full of nachos or chili dogs—spirited gluttony as entertainment.

The ire from the industry is palpable: At a recent panel at the New York Wine& Food Festival, star chefs David Chang and Anthony Bourdain sat down to “call bullshit” on several aspects of the food world, and singled out Fieri as the enemy. Chang noted Fieri's “douche glasses,” and “stupid f***ing armband,” and he asked Bourdain to “catch me and kick me in the ass” if he ever took on the look. Bourdain gave similarly derisive comments to the press about Fieri, telling TV Guide, “Did you ever see the Simpsons episode where it's decided that Itchy and Scratchy need a sidekick? So a committee gets together and they invent one called Poochie... Guy Fieri kind of looks like he's been designed by committee.”