Entertainment

Ex-coworker calls Fieri lewd and homophobic

Food Network star Guy Fieri is lewd and homophobic if you ask the creator of his popular show, “Diners, Drive-ins and Dives.”

“You have to protect Guy from all of his poop jokes,” Triple D creator David Page told Minneapolis’ City Pages last week.

“Anytime any woman mentioned ‘cream,’ Guy went into a sexual riff. When cutting the show, you had to tell the editors to watch Guy’s eye line, because it’s always on breasts,” Page said before accusing Fieri of being uncomfortable around homosexuals.

Page — who was forced off “Diners” in May — said that after filming an early episode of the show, an annoyed Fieri called him.

“Guy had decided that the two men running the restaurant were life partners,” Page said. “He said, ‘You can’t send me to talk to gay people without warning! Those people weird me out!’ ”

A spokesman for Fieri, who has a gay sister, said, “Anyone who knows Guy knows he would never make the kind of comments attributed to him in this story. They are offensive, not in his nature and just not true. What saddens Guy most is that he considered David a mentor, and he’s not quite sure what drove him to do this.”

This is just the latest episode between Fieri and the notoriously hot-headed Page, who started their war of words when Food Network tried to force Page off the show earlier this year.

A battle of lawsuits followed with Page claiming that Fieri had grown arrogant and hard to handle while Food Network accused Page of creating a hellish work environment punctuated by e-mails, like the one where he called an employee a “vile uninformed piece of s–t.”

The environment was so bad that when Fieri came to New York City a couple of weeks ago to shoot upcoming episodes of “Diners,” he came with Page’s film crew — the crew left Page’s production company after the lawsuits were settled out of court.

A show insider said, “They all came over when David left — even some of the people David fired — which really tells you something.”

But an on-set producer with “Diners,” who didn’t want to be named for fear of retribution, had another angle on the feud between Fieri and Page.

“You know, [Food Network] wanted to make the show more personality-driven and less about every single little step that it takes to make the food. They wanted to make it more about Guy. That’s what it really came down to — the food is what got this show off the ground, but now it’s really all about Guy,” he said.