Guy Fieri can’t seem to catch a break in the Big Apple.
First his new Manhattan restaurant, Guy’s American Kitchen And Bar, received a scathing review in November from The New York Times, which set off a torrent of bad press.
Now a New York-based programmer has built a parody website of Fieri’s eatery at GuysAmericanKitchenAndBar.com that's gone viral. The real website is GuysAmerican.com.
The spoof site shows a fake menu that includes items like “Guy’s Big Balls,” which are described as “two 4-pound Rice-A-Roni crusted mozzarella balls endangered with shaved lamb and pork and blasted with Guy’s signature Cadillac Cream sauce.”
Also listed is the “38 oz of super-saddened, Cheez-gutted wolf meat” for $49.95.
Bryan Mytko, the programmer behind the prank, proudly tweeted out his creation Tuesday evening:
Guy Fieri didn't register his restaurant's domain name, so I picked it up. I think this new menu look greatguysamericankitchenandbar.com
— Bryan Mytko (@BryanMytko) February 19, 2013
Mtyko is hardly the first person to poke fun at the menu. In his review of the restaurant, NYT food critic Pete Wells asked Fieri outright: “Did panic grip your soul as you stared into the whirling hypno wheel of the menu, where adjectives and nouns spin in a crazy vortex?”
Guy's American Kitchen And Bar's real menu, Wells noted, listed items like “Guy’s Pat LaFrieda custom blend, all-natural Creekstone Farm Black Angus beef patty, LTOP (lettuce, tomato, onion + pickle), SMC (super-melty-cheese) and a slathering of Donkey Sauce on garlic-buttered brioche.”
In September, another Internet prankster hacked into the restaurant's site during a GoDaddy.com outage and re-wrote the menu.
Despite the pranks and negative press, a manager told Bloomberg in December that the restaurant "has been doing very well," The Atlantic Wire noted.
Fieri’s restaurant is only the latest food brand to suffer online humiliation this week. On Monday, hackers breached the Twitter account of Burger King, posting messages that falsely said McDonald’s had purchased the fast food chain.
Update: It looks like Mtyko got some inspiration from several Twitter users, among other sources. Eater has a full run down and Slate has info on where the menu items came from:
At least parts of that hilarious fake Guy Fieri menu guysamericankitchenandbar.com were ripped off from Twitter: i.imgur.com/ZQ0IVbU.png
— Slate (@Slate) February 20, 2013