The Grill Dads Bring The Fire From Their New Cookbook And Talk Guy Fieri - Exclusive Interview

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Combining the double takes and slow burns of standup comics with killer cooking chops, The Grill Dads — Mark Anderson and Ryan Fey — are definitely not your usual Food Network stars. On the heels of their two hit shows "The Grill Dads" and "Comfort Food Tour," the long-time best buds are releasing their first cookbook, "The Best Grilling Cookbook Ever Written By Two Idiots." In her introduction to the cookbook, actress Eva Longoria writes, "This book will empower you to light up your grill and use it to its full potential." In an exclusive interview with Mashed, whip-smart Anderson and Fey talked about the long, winding road they took since college to get them to where they are today. 

Anderson and Fey have an easy-going camaraderie and throughout our interview, finished each other's sentences and thoughts as old friends often do. Neither is a trained chef, and both had successful careers in advertising and event production, but when their regular backyard barbecues at Fey's Los Angeles house became the talk of the town, they employed their savvy business skills to create their own brand, The Grill Dads. When they won Guy Fieri's "Guy's Big Project," The Grill Dads were launched, and what started out as a hobby became a sensation, but it wasn't always smooth sailing. Anderson and Fey candidly discuses their eye-opening experience at Food Network, their working relationship with Guy Fieri, and why their debut cookbook is aspirational for beginners and seasoned grillers alike.

How did you decide to work together?

Anderson: I moved to LA when I got a divorce. I was in Atlanta trying to figure out where to go, and the brief was anywhere but Atlanta. The weather there was not for me. And Fey was like, "hey, our back house in LA is an apartment, why don't you come out here?" His wife, at the time, she was super on board. I had a week ... showed up with a moving truck, and then it was every weekend we were cooking, and it was a small, maybe 1,000, 1100 square-foot Spanish house. We were having 40, 50, 60 people over. We always loved grilling, but we did more grilling out of necessity.

Fey: We had a bigger backyard than our house.

Anderson: We'd have more room. It was also more social, because everybody was outside. The cooking was part of the event at that point. It evolved to where we had a few restaurants ask us to do guest executive takeovers because we also were working in advertising at the time. We would sell out two or three seatings at these restaurants, and they loved it. At that point, we, "Hey, what are we going to do with this?" We're advertising guys. We're good at marketing. We should do something. 

We were thinking about buying a restaurant in LA, and my dad was in banking for 40 years. He told me that if I bought a restaurant, he would disown me. The quote he said was, "The lucky ones fail quick." We're like, "Hey, we create content for a living for other brands. Let's do it for ourselves." We decided to do the Grill Dads to scratch our creative itch for creating content, but also cooking. That's how it all got started.

Fey: That's actually what's a little bit different from Mark and I, we weren't on a food path. We were on a lifestyle path. As brand purveyors and guys that have spent 20 years in creating brands for other people, we premeditatedly created The Grill Dads out of the idea that we wanted to make some IP, do something with it potentially. We didn't realize it would become — it was a side hustle for a minute — we didn't realize it would get as big as it has and is continuing to get, and it's really a fun ride, so much so that this is the empire that Mark and I are working to build, and we're having a lot of fun doing it. We offer entertainment and practical cooking recipes and tips and all that stuff.

We're a comedy team, so we bring levity to food. With what we all just went through over the past couple years, I don't think there's a better time for us to not take ourselves too seriously. Truth be told, we're also here to disrupt how dads [a]re portrayed in the media. We're modern dads. We're very different from the grass mowing, New Balance wearing, braided-belt guys that you see ... We have no problem with that, but that's not us. A lot of times, Mark and I say this all the time: "A grill is a tool, barbecue is a cuisine." We show people how to make everything you can imagine on the grill and all different methods, whether it's fire and smoke, you name it. That's the key, and that's [why] a gateway drug for cooking outside is what we provide.

Why did you want to avoid "Guy's Big Project"?

Fey: Trust me, no one wants to look at us on reality television. We got faces for radio. Just ask our parents.

Anderson: We're old and we're cynical. It's like I told the producers, if some 20-year-old [production assistant] comes up to my room at 2:00 in the morning, hands me a tuna can and GPS coordinates and tells me to go on this hunt for these different things, I'm going to the airport. I don't have the energy to do any of that bulls***.

Fey: In our minds, it's not our thing. The interesting thing is, the reason we won is we have no fear because we're literally us. We're this buddy-comedy thing that everyone likes. It's Mark and I. We've been doing this same s*** for years. In fact, his wife is the one who said, "You idiots need to put a camera on you. You guys are going to win, and you need to be on TV just because... there's an endearing quality, it's hard to hate on good dads. You guys are self-deprecating. You have a really good time, and you create banging food, and you're very approachable to people. And... although you may look like 'Duck Dynasty,' you have a level of polish in your vernacular and other ways of using this model and this mechanism to make people laugh and have a really good time."

Anderson: It's also going on a reality show and feels incredibly vulnerable ... each episode was 42 minutes. They had over 5,000 minutes of footage per episode. They can make you look mad. They can make you look happy. They can make you look stupid. They can make you look smart. That's the part that was really nerve-wracking for me. We called someone who's become a good friend of ours now who won. She won "Next Food Network Star"... We're like, "Hey, we're nervous about doing this because they can make us look like d-bags." She goes, "How about you guys just don't ever be d-bags in front of the camera?"

Fey: Mark and I made a pact ... We're going to be nothing but ourselves, and that's it. Win, lose, or draw... We're going to have fun with the crew. That's where people forget, there are 80 people working for you on these reality shows. People don't even have empathy for those positions. Mark and I, we took people out, we got [them] presents. We hung out and got to know people's names and what they're interested in.  We also are ad guys. We've worked with some of them after the show, we got them jobs. We formed really long-lasting relationships and didn't look at it as something they owe us. It's [a] very different mentality from a lot of the kids that go on and think, "Well, it's me, me, me." It's not.

Fey: We also were very privy, when we, early on, said, "We were curious" — to the Food Network brass — "how much marketing dollars are you going to put in this?" They said zero. We said "Zero, as in like not a lot of money or actually zero?" [It was] actually zero. We're like, "Oh, no s***. We hope the audience will find us. That's what you're saying." Being ad guys, we know enough to know about paid, earned, and owned media and understand how those things work ... the model honestly was very different from what we were used to and what we thought. 

We took it upon ourselves to do a lot of our own press, a lot of our own stuff because we're not going to wait for these guys, because they're not going to do anything. It's their model, but Mark and I, we respect the process. The problem is it's a business — a creative entity, it is a business. They got to sell ads, and those ads have to be continued to re-up. If they would've unleashed this, we would've crushed it even more and had a whole different set of offerings and IP. It wasn't the way they wanted to play ball.

Anderson: We also learned really quickly that the Food Network is a starting line, not a finish line. A lot of people look at that the wrong way. We got a crash course on that in about two seconds because we're like, "This is our social following. On one night, Guy's going to crown us the winner — which actually was recorded months in advance — and then right after that, our show was going to debut." This was a Tuesday night, 9:00 p.m., prime time Food Network, premiere of our show. We're like, "All right, here we come, social media domination." We'll do this. We'll do that. We woke up the next morning and had 11 new Instagram followers...

If we want to make this a successful career that's bigger than a period on one of these shows, we're going to have to go out and build it for ourselves. That's why with this cookbook that's coming out, we're super excited to get a publisher that was willing to take a chance on us and help us take our brand to the next level. When they gave us the deal, we said, "We're going to go crazy with it. We're okay with being the biggest selling cookbook in the history of your agency... We're okay with being the absolute worst, but what scares the s*** out of us the most is disappearing into the middle of the pack with a safe, predictable book." They were like, "Cool. Let's do it".

Do you have advice for first time grillers?

Fey: Fail big. It's the only way you're going to learn ... Mark's actually more of a student of this than I am, but he'll cook a hundred steaks straight to try and figure out how to dial it in. He's very good at that. We encourage everyone to catch something on fire, go out and actually understand your machine, understand the tool and to do that sometimes you've got to be a mess. Creativity's not clean. You need to go out and try things and see if it works and laugh about it if it doesn't, and then do it better next time.

Anderson: We really encourage people to try the same thing over and over until it makes them super excited. I always go in, I always hyper focus on one thing and try and get great at it until I'd rather have it at home than at any restaurant I've ever been to.

Fey: That's why it's different for Mark because I'm good right out the gate. It takes him a lot longer to get.

Anderson: By the way, he's always good at something about two months after I show him how to do it, but you got to get the reps in ... You need to be at the plate and get some swings and then, and take notes like, "This was charred on the outside, raw on the inside." What was the grill heat like? You're going to find that your grill has hot spots and spots that are easy to flare up and spots that don't, and eventually it's going to start to become organic, and that's when the creativity comes into play. 

When you understand the fundamentals of cooking, that's the most exciting part, because that's when you go to the grocery store, you walk up to the butcher, and you stand in front of the case and you're like, "What looks good?" Then, you buy what looks good there, and you go to the vegetables and you build a menu back from that, based on all the experiences that you had.

Fey: The other thing is ask a lot of questions. If you don't know, have the confidence to be like, "I don't know, how do I do this?" We get more questions and DMs about things that, every day, all day, all the time. We answer everybody. That's the other thing, we're so present in the art and the practice of doing stuff, because it's fun for us. We have a blast doing it. Other people experience that. 

By the way, there's a really big movement [about] the idea that, especially with coronavirus and things, the outside kitchen is as equally or better of a congregational place than it is in your kitchen in your house. When you weren't allowed to congregate in your house, at least you could go outside, for a while. It's exploded. Look at what's happened to a lot of these grill brands and other places. They've exploded because of the pandemic, us too, because people are wanting to learn how to do stuff on their own, which is great. This Renaissance of outdoor cooking is incredible to me.