The Guy’s American Kitchen waitress studied the half-chewed pork, slaw, salmon, mashed potatoes and maybe moon rocks we’d left on our plates. I wouldn’t feed the mess to a cat — the end-product of our struggle to extract edible elements from heaps of sugar and sludge masquerading as normal food.
“Would you like me to wrap that up for you?” she chirped.
I promise: One day soon, I’ll go back to reviewing real restaurants with real chefs. Enough of laugh riots like Ryu, Purple Fig and Mihoko’s 21 Grams!
But until the fall’s legitimate openings actually showup, we’ll do with the West 44th Street punch line from TV kitchen clown/wannabe rocker/ global menace Guy Fieri.
You expect it to be awful, of course—how could things like “Unyawns cajun chicken ciabatta with donkey sauce” not be awful? But Fieri must believe his name alone will fill 500 seats, as if Times Square tourists couldn’t also choose Applebee’s, Bubba Gump Shrimp or the very respectable Carmine’s down the block.
Guy’s isn’t bad looking for what it is — a colorful, three level sprawl of Americana, guitars, memorabilia and murals framed in warm brick. But one night, with maybe 400 seats free, the hostess showed us to the worst in the house: a tiny “table” for two in the deserted front bar.
A protest scored us a perch in the far back “Studio” room, where the televised NFL barely took the edge off turd shaped Awesome Pretzel Chicken Tenders, tasting not of chicken, pretzel or any recognizable digestible matter.
Guy’s does factory farm cuisine one better: Everything emerges from mysterious engines, deep in the bowels of the former New York Times loading dock, tooled to make all items taste alike.
I’m a soft touch for junk food turned out with integrity— but not for stale, ice cold focaccia ($3.95 for “bread”!), sashimi tacos with scarcely a molecule of tuna, or bone-dry pulled pork on unheated buns.
Sugar by the truckload has the run of the menu. It glazes commercial-grade salmon and hulihuli chicken. It pops up in a dip for mozzarella and pepperoni scrunched inside a leathery panko crust. In “Thai chili” form, it bleeds through “California egg rolls” filled with chicken, avocado, ginger, peppers— but tasting of none.
One good dish squeaked through: juicy, braised pork shank which, while tasting not at all of the promised General Tso, peeled easily from the bone.
Pasta ended the rally. Fettuccine came with cajun-spiced blackened chicken breast—random meat fragments neither blackened nor spiced. Creamy Parmesan sauce could moonlight as engine lubricant. The plate must hold 3,000 calories. Could one human eat it all? If so, should he or she be allowed out of the house?
Irish-German chocolate cake was the sort of sickly-sweet affair that pleases when you’re drunk at 2 a.m. It came with stone-hard “malt balls” that failed to yield to knife or fork.
I took one of the balls home. A steak knife severed it in two, but my teeth didn’t make a dent. A hammer did the trick. By then I decided to leave further taste testing to Times Square’s bus tour gourmands.
scuozzo@nypost.com