Guy Fieri Had Never Seen Food Network Before Becoming Their Next Star
Guy Fieri is among the first people you think of when looking for content on Food Network. His hit shows like "Guy's Grocery Games" and "Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives" and eponymous restaurants like Guy Fieri's Flavortown Kitchen ensure that he's never out of the public consciousness for long. In an industry stuffed with well-known, critically acclaimed figures like Chef Gordon Ramsay and the late Anthony Bourdain, it isn't easy to stay on people's minds much less maintain your status as a consistent star for a food-leaning network. His charismatic image and bold aesthetic would prove to be a staple on Food Network, and now Fieri has spent more than a decade exposing the public to a plethora of comfort food they could never have imagined.
However, Fieri didn't start in food as a celebrity. Some skills and a little bit of luck were involved in his career journey, which involved an early job selling mufflers and opening his first-ever restaurant. Fieri makes use of a public persona many will recognize industry-wide as a winning formula that gave a "Flavortown" facelift to the more traditional and played-out cooking show offerings of the past. As it turns out, the reason he was able to bring such a fresh perspective to mainstream food TV may have been because he wasn't actually very familiar with it.
Guy Fieri went in blind
In an interview with Marc Summers on his podcast "Marc Summers Unwraps," Guy Fieri spills on everything from a pilot that he wanted nothing to do with after he filmed it to getting his start on Food Network without ever watching it previously. "I don't even know what I was doing there. That was a bunch of buddies trying to be funny, telling me that I should go do this television show," Fieri said, referring to his Food Network Star win that propelled his career from civilian chef to celebrity.
Fieri would go on to own multiple restaurants through his success and host over 10 separate TV shows for the network as one of their mainstays, all because of what his friends in the industry thought would fail. If nothing else it shows the untapped potential of an everyman like Fieri who could just as easily have lived his life as a regular person working his own kitchen to some quiet success. But because he took that chance to prove some friends wrong with a blind opportunity, he built a brand that lasts to this day as a Food Network star.