These Are Guy Fieri's Worst Recipes

Guy Fieri is more known for eating than cooking, but he can cook. Fieri got an early start in the food business when he and his dad began selling soft pretzels from a cart when he was only ten years old, and he was able to sell enough pretzels to fund a semester abroad in Chantilly, France, where he fell in love with the culinary world. Fieri opened his first restaurant, Johnny Garlic's, in 1996, which eventually expanded to seven locations across California before the chain closed permanently. Guy Fieri shot to fame after winning the second season of The Next Food Network Star and is best known for his show Diners, Drive-ins and Dives.

You might think that it would be easy to find a list of truly awful recipes from Guy Fieri, a.k.a. the bleach-blonde, loud-mouthed mayor of Flavortown. Guy's American Kitchen & Bar did get a zero-star review from the New York Times, and Fieri has the habit of naming recipes things like "Mac-Daddi-Roni Salad." Guy Fieri is not high brow. But he is definitely a master of traditional, hearty American food. His barbecue advice is unimpeachable. This burger recipe is pretty freaking amazing. But some of his recipes just don't make the cut.

Most of Guy Fieri's cocktail recipes are kitschy but respectable, but this blue nightmare is where he goes over the line. Fieri starts out on the wrong foot by recommending two ounces of a lemon-flavored rum. Why not just add a little squeeze of lemon and use good rum? He recommends Bacardi Limon, a rum with a crazy low score on Rum Ratings and a barely better on Distiller. 

The recipe continues with a quarter-ounce sweet blue liqueur ("recommended: Blue Curacao") and then a quarter-ounce of sweet and sour mix. At this point, your teeth and your stomach should be angry at the coming onslaught of sugar, acid, and booze. But wait! Add two ounces each of pineapple and grapefruit juice, two flavors that will want to duke it out in your mouth, some shaved ice, and then garnish it with a maraschino cherry, something that should only top a Shirley Temple. After you've assembled your Electric Ice, grab some Advil for the morning after.

The egg roll is a Chinese–American dish, so Guy Fieri isn't stepping on Chinese culinary tradition here. In the 1930s, a chef in New York City first published recipe for what became the egg roll, and now no order of Chinese takeout feels complete without it. Regardless of the egg roll's American origins, though, I think we can all agree that a Philly cheesesteak egg roll is essentially a deep-fried Philly cheesesteak. A cheesesteak isn't exactly a light meal. And it doesn't really resemble what you would normally find in an egg roll. This is another Guy Fieri culinary mashup that no one asked for, and it seems greasy as hell.

The filling of Guy Fieri's egg roll is also arguably not a Philly cheesesteak. Fieri uses pepper jack cheese instead of the traditional American or Provolone, and roast beef instead of, you know, steak. If you change the cheese and you don't use steak, and then you wrap it up in an egg roll, can you even call it a cheesesteak?

Let's hop off that deep-fried bus to Flavortown for just a moment, maybe pop a Tums or two, and get acquainted with a simple and lovely dish known as haluski, a comfort food that can be claimed by the Polish, Slovaks, Ukrainians, and Hungarians that consists of egg noodles or potato dumplings mixed with cabbage, onions, sheep or goat cheese, and pork. Haluski varies from region to region, but it essentially is an easy-to-make dish with simple ingredients.

Enter Guy Fieri's holy haluski recipe, which goes well beyond noodles, cabbage, onion, and meat. Fieri's recipe adds capers, peas, parsley, white wine, lemon juice, thyme, and carrots. Fieri also opts for thinly sliced pancetta instead of the more humble bacon you might find in in a bowl of haluski in a diner in Pennsylvania. The addition of so many ingredients may not seem like such a big deal — what's a few vegetables, right? — but imagine a potato latkes recipe adding seven ingredients that aren't potatoes, eggs, flour, and onions. This is a nice pasta recipe, but it's not real haluski.

Guy Fieri is probably better known for another sauce, donkey sauce, which is his trademarked version of aioli with a Flavortown-appropriate name. And there are many versions of a "special" or "secret" sauce. In-n-Out Burger's "secret" sauce is pretty much just Thousand Island, as is McDonald's. When you see the ingredient list of your favorite fast food chain's "secret sauce," it may make the thought of eating a burger there in the future a little less appealing.

So it isn't really Guy Fieri's fault that his reading his special sauce recipe is more of a WTF journey than a bus straight to Flavortown because it starts out as a pretty standard "special burger sauce" recipe. Nonetheless, it's still pretty gross. Two cups mayo, a half-cup ketchup, and a quarter cup of yellow mustard all together? And this can be used as a dip, apparently, as well as a sauce? To add insult to injury, the last ingredient is two tablespoons of water, despite the fact a slightly watery mayonnaise-based dip is appetizing to no one, ever.

To be fair to the Mayor of Flavortown, the actual recipe for these so-called trashcan nachos looks pretty amazing. His so-called "SMC" (super melty cheese) mixture of half and half, Velveeta, smoked gouda, white cheddar, Worcestershire sauce, and Tabasco is pure genius. Including smoked brisket and pickled red onions is classy AF. So why is this delicious nachos recipe on this list? For one, the unappealing name. We are humans, not raccoons, no? And second, the method of presentation is grotesque, reminiscent of the weirdest of Chef Club's horrifying Instagram videos.

At Guy Fieri's Vegas Kitchen, the server brings a plate with a mini trashcan of nachos to the table, pulls the trashcan away, and voila! A tower of wet, kind of-congealed nachos, with nary a dry chip in sight. A video of the un-trashcanning went viral on Twitter, and while some people thought it looked amazing, others just couldn't stomach even the sight of it.

Fieri debuted the trashcan method at the South Beach Wine & Food Festival in 2015, making what looks like some very wet, cheesy nachos in an actual trashcan because, according to the Food Network's blog about the event, "It was the only container large enough to hold his super-layered snack."