Remembering Chez: Eating With The Enemy

The day when Chez and his fiancée Taryn ate out at his mortal enemy Guy Fieri's restaurant in Las Vegas.

Five years ago today, we lost one of the founding members of The Banter team, Chez Pazienza. Not a day goes by when I don’t think of my friend and what he would have to say about what is going on in the world today (a lot, no doubt). At the age of 47, he was taken from us far, far too soon. But instead of being sad about his untimely passing, I want to remember him for the good times. He was one of the funniest writers I’ve even come across, and his dark humor helped him create an almost cult like following online. Fired from pretty much every job he ever had, Chez found his home at The Daily Banter. Why? Because he could write pretty much whatever he wanted and I wouldn’t fire him. He came very close, believe me, but I stuck it out because, well, I enjoyed the fuck out of him.

He wrote this piece in July of 2015 after eating out at someone he spent much of his career mocking relentlessly, the TV chef Guy Fieri. God knows why Chez had it out for him, but he did, and it was bloody funny. Anyway, I recovered this from our members magazine ‘Banter M’ and am reposting both parts below.

Enjoy, and save a thought for Chez. We miss you man.

- Ben

Welcome to Flavortown

by Chez Pazienza

"Table for two?" the smiling young woman asks. She's maybe 22, with what appears to be a hint of Asian ancestry and dressed far too stylishly for the place my fiancée and I are about to enter.

"Actually, we can just sit at the bar," I reply, returning her plastic smile. "Also -- I hate myself."

In order to get this far we've already had to thread our way through a crowd which extends from just beyond the doors, into the foyer and all the way up to the hostess stand. Outside, people are standing in 104-degree heat, even as the sun is beginning to set. But once inside to the relative cool -- cool in the literal sense, certainly not like cool in the "Steve McQueen" sense -- most have begun trying to plaster their bodies against the walls for support and jockeying for the plentiful bench seating in the waiting area. From that standpoint, this place is no different than your average Red Lobster, save for the sound of Tom Petty's American Girl which is blaring over the in-house sound system.

The nice hostess shoots me a confused look, not quite sure how to respond to what's either sarcasm or my telegraphed intension to do harm to myself in front of the maybe 250 very white, moderately overweight people currently packing this restaurant. Before she can respond, I move toward the bar -- my fiancée following behind me with an expression attached to her face that says less "getting a bite to eat" than it does "Bataan death march."

Once we've cleared the hostess stand and the place has really opened up, the truly glory of where we're dining tonight is revealed. I let it all wash over me: the sounds, the sights, the scents. It is everything I expected. It is everything I imagined. It is "America" represented in a restaurant. It is so wonderfully Guy. Welcome to Flavortown.

Okay, let me back up a little bit.

I hadn't taken a vacation in almost four years. Maybe Taryn and I were lucky enough to get away somewhere close for a weekend here and there -- and even that hadn't happened in quite a while -- and we'd spent a couple of Christmases at my family's place in Miami with my daughter. But a full-fledged vacation where it was just the two of us -- that had never happened. So earlier in the month, we'd made the decision that we were going to just get in the car and go away for a week. One of the benefits of living in Los Angeles is that there's so much within driving distance, and with that in mind we figured why not start in Vegas and go from there -- maybe see the Grand Canyon and then hit Lake Havasu and wind the whole thing up in Palm Springs for a few days. Where we are now is stop-one on our Summer Vacation Tour.

We pulled into Vegas a couple of days ago, got a room at the Vdara at CityCenter -- given that it's so hot right now, hotel rooms are a steal -- and have spent the past 48 hours laying by the pool, downing a few drinks and just generally not having to do a damn thing. I never really put much stock in the necessity of decompressing from the stresses of everyday life, but when you and your partner work five jobs between the two of you -- when you feel like neither of you ever stops working -- it really does become essential to preventing yourself from losing your mind and tearing off the head of the next asshole who so much as rubs you the wrong way. We needed some time off. We really needed some time off.

Given that Taryn's a journeyman chef -- among her other vocations -- we've of course taken the opportunity to eat pretty well while in Vegas. So far we've done Sage and Julian Serrano and grabbed oysters and beer at Todd English PUB. We tried to get lunch at Mesa Grill at one point -- because Taryn and I have spent so much time poking fun at Bobby Flay and it would be enjoyable to ask a server if there's a "divorce special" on the menu -- that it just feels necessary, but it had already closed for dinner prep. Yeah, we're well aware of Lotus of Siam, which is supposed to be phenomenal, but I guess we figure that since we live in L.A. and there's masterful Northern Thai food always within a few miles, we can skip it this time around. Vegas these days really does provide a plethora of great eats -- but from the moment we arrived, I began making jokes about the one place we just had to buckle down and brave. It's the one place that seemed to sum up the entire Vegas experience, from the one man who personifies Vegas in all its grotesque excess and reputation as a Mecca for Middle-America. The man, of course, was Guy Fieri. The restaurant was Guy Fieri's Vegas Kitchen and Bar.

And that's what led us here. To the Linq, directly across from Caesars.

Every time I've mentioned the prospect of making the pilgrimage to "Flavortown" since our arrival in Vegas, often with the most ridiculous of exaggerated grins on my face, Taryn has made her, ahem, distaste pretty well known. There currently exists an Instagram photo I took of her last night responding to my suggestion with a pair of middle fingers in the air. Even as a joke -- even after a few afternoon beers -- she wants nothing to do with this place. As I lead us toward the bar now, I can practically feel the disgust wafting off of her. I'm half expecting to suddenly feel her arm reach around my throat as she pulls me down to the floor and Ronda Rouseys me into unconsciousness. In here, that would probably earn her a steady chorus of "whoops" and "hollers" over the sound of, say, Night Ranger's Sister Christian, which from that point forward would be her "entry song" for when she walked out to the octagon.

I can't exactly pretend that it makes sense for me to be here either. While Taryn loathes Guy Fieri -- a wholly owned subsidiary of the "Guy Fieri" brand -- to the point where she refuses to call him by anything other than his real last name, Ferry, I've made a contact sport out of eviscerating of the man online over the past few years. I've called him a "culinary terrorist" who "literally couldn't desecrate food more if he took a shit on it," and I've even called this particular restaurant "a food abortion clinic.""There’s nothing sacred that he can’t take his small frosted-and-spiky-pubed cock out and piss all over in the name of bringing brand-name douchery to the masses," were, I believe, my exact words at one point. There's even less reason for me to be here than there is for Taryn, given that by merely setting foot in this place I'm proving myself the mayor of Hypocrisytown. Or, I would be, if it weren't for the fact that I believe that nothing -- and I mean nothing -- should ever get in the way of the mainline of pure entertainment to be had from being in an environment where you can MST3K the hell out of everything in sight. Going to a Guy Fieri restaurant is like the Olympics of sarcastic mockery. And Taryn and I are a 10-time gold medalist pair at that shit.

The first thing you notice when you enter the main room of Guy Fieri's Vegas Kitchen and Bar is that it's loud. It's not busy-Chili's-on-a-Friday-night-in-Orlando loud, it's SAE-party-at-Arizona-State loud. There's no surprise that Guy's Vegas outpost would be popular, given that Fieri is actually from Vegas and is, again, the living embodiment of what Vegas means to the middle-aged white people who flood its casinos to, as Hunter Thompson so eloquently put it, "hump the American dream" into submission. But the design of the place is so cavernous and seems to be acoustically designed to amplify every single individual sound within that it resembles one of those "Sportatorium"-like venues where, maybe not without coincidence, Sammy Hagar and Dokken are still booked regularly. Given that Fieri's entire M.O. is to turn everything up to 11 -- auditorily, visually and gustatorily -- all of this is to be expected. It's like Fieri is an all-American Willy Wonka and you're entering his land of Pure Amplification. The sign on the outside of the building reads, Guy-style, "Go Big or Go Home" and that tells you everything you need to know. It's a promise. It's a threat. It's a mission statement. It's a way of life.

The second thing you notice about about Guy Fieri's Vegas Kitchen and Bar is that, predictably, the entire place is a concrete homage to Guy. Millennia from now, after Vegas has been buried and all humanity has been wiped from the face of the earth, aliens will dig Vegas out of the sand, crack open this place and think it's a temple to the great white-haired god worshipped by whatever beings lived here long ago. An image of Guy Fieri towers over the entire place by way of a giant Duratrans. Fieri memorabilia line every wall. Guy merch is available for purchase in seemingly each nook and cranny of the room. Even if he's not here in body, Guy is with us. And this is what his people want.

We make our way to the lengthy box-style bar in the middle of the place and, as if by divine providence, find two seats right in the center of the action. The backs and seats of the barstools are made to look like they're covered in cowskin -- or maybe they really are the remnants of some of the dishes on the menu, with Fieri paying tribute to what's sure to be some American Indian in his blood by respectfully using every part of the animal he's killed for the sustenance of his tribe. I'm all exaggerated childlike giddiness; Taryn already looks utterly defeated, like she's trapped in a car with someone who's continuously farting and has locked the windows. I pull her barstool out for her, because class is what's expected and demanded in a Guy Fieri restaurant, and we take our place among the Fieri Nation. Next stop -- Flavortown.

---

Welcome to Flavortown (Part 2)

When Guy Fieri's Vegas Kitchen and Bar first opened last year, I mocked it mercilessly. I called the place a "food abortion clinic" and claimed that, in keeping with Fieri tradition, the menu defiled not simply different cuisines and styles of cooking but the English language. Fieri doesn't just throw together, say, a burger or some chicken wings. He brings you psychotically over-the-top concoctions with names like the Off-Da-Hook Original Smash Burger topped with Crunchy Righteous Rojo Rings or Parmageddon Wings with Apocalyptic Marinara, so that the menu doesn't sound like a menu so much as the storyboard of a lost Michael Bay movie starring Vince Vaughn. But here's a big secret: I once kind of liked Fieri, back before he was the dominant culinary force in America-- the most recognizable celebrity chef in the country.

There was a time when Fieri, born Guy Ramsay Ferry -- yes, his hyper-articulated Italian stage name is bullshit and his middle name is that of another celebrity chef, albeit one with a few Michelin stars under his belt -- just ran a couple of restaurants in his home of Santa Rosa. He had actually studied cooking in France, so it's not as if he has no idea what he was doing, but right off the bat he decided that his shtick would be to take the basics of haute cuisine and funhouse-mirror them down to Middle-American, casual dining level. He concentrated heavily on the unholy, Frankenstein-style fusion of disparate tastes and cultures and in packaging it all in a way that screamed -- almost literally, screamed -- "America, fuck yeah!" It's this ethos that would eventually draw the wrath of Anthony Bourdain, another classically trained journeyman chef, who says that Fieri's crime against cuisine is that he disrespects food and the cultures from which it came.

Nowhere was that more obvious than within the four walls of one of Fieri's original restaurants, the cleverly named Tex Wasabi's, where you can still get "custom creations from the Sensai of Flavortown!" to this day and whose logo features a cowboy riding a koi. Tex Wasabi's is, predictably, an Asian restaurant for people who are absolutely terrified of Asian food. It's a profane mish-mash of both Japanese and Chinese cuisine designed to be scarfed down by those who can't tell the difference. It's Chinese for people whose only experience with China is watching The Karate Kid and Japanese for people whose only experience with Japan is boasting about how we kicked their ass in WWII. At Tex Wasabi's you can get "Eddie's Mommy" Edamame and Sashimi Won Tacos, Rockin' Lava Shrimp and something called Crouching Tiger/Hidden Salad, which means that at Tex Wasabi's you can begin to understand exactly what Bourdain means about Guy Fieri.

Back in 2000, the original Japanese Iron Chef TV show hosted a young Bobby Flay, who challenged Masaharu Morimoto, a chef who at that time was known pretty much only in his native country. During the battle, Flay jumped up on his cutting board and raised his arms in victory. Morimoto was visibly pissed, the reason being that to the Japanese the tools of a chef are sacred, but here was this ugly, impertinent American douchebag ignoring decorum and literally stomping on the customs of their culture. Morimoto found Flay's actions insulting, but if that's true then what Fieri does every single day and night at Tex Wasabi's is the equivalent of taking his dick out and urinating all over that cutting board.

Fieri flat-out defiles Japanese tradition -- and that of several other Asian cultures for that matter -- and he does it as a matter of practice. And yet, for a while his dumb slobbering bull-in-a-china-shop routine was charming. It was that charm, as well as the fact that he actually can cook, that helped him to take home the prize on the second season of the Food Network's Next Food Network Star competition. Not long after that, he was a household name. And not long after that, he was fucking ubiquitous, the ambassador of American cooking that confirmed every grotesque stereotype about us as a country and a culture -- an Affliction t-shirt with a spatula as willed into thin air by Disney's imagineers.

And now here I am, at his Vegas temple to himself and his view of what food should look, sound and taste like. I've pulled up a stool next to my fiancée at Guy Fieri's Vegas Kitchen and Bar and we're about to experience Flavortown for ourselves, as much as it'll probably kill us a little inside. The bar area is deafening, with the echoes of maybe 250 people talking at the same time bouncing off the concrete walls and high ceilings and the sound of Def Leppard's Pour Some Sugar on Me pounding out of the sound system.

I turn to Taryn and give her an exaggerated smile. She stares directly in front of her like a trapped animal that's finally accepted its fate.

The bartender approaches us from the other side of the bar. He's wearing a 50s-style bowling shirt, black with red accents; he has plugs in his earlobes and his hair is spiked up stiff and blown back so that he looks like either an Italian porcupine or a ticket scalper at a Nickelback show in Jacksonville. To his credit, he seems to immediately understand that we're a couple of wise-asses who are there for no other reason than on a dare.

He has no desire to put up with our shit and this make me respect him a hell of a lot more. I make an immediate decision to be as cool as possible to him and Taryn concurs.

First thing's first: we order a couple of shots. We need them. In honor of Guy's flaming bowling shirt, and because it somehow just feels appropriate, we make them Fireballs. Down they go.

"You guys want any food?" our bartender asks.

"Oh yes," I say, trying to contain my glee.

He plops a couple of menus down in front of us and we begin poring over them, which isn't really necessary since I once wrote a piece mercilessly ridiculing every detail of what's available to eat and drink here. Do we order a Knuckle Sandwich, a Tatted-Up Turkey Burger -- or maybe just a Brutha's Bad-Ass Caesar Salad? So many choices, all of them sounding like the kind of thing that's going to keep the bathroom of our hotel room well-occupied throughout the night.

Taryn and I have so far made this trip about chicken wings, making sure to grab wings wherever we stop for lunch, so the choice here is obvious. There are currently three varieties under the "Ain't No Thing Butta Chicken Wing" part of the Guy's Vegas menu. Since we've already chosen to drink molecular Alien acid rather than eat it, the Fireball Wings are out of the question. That leaves the Double Barrel BBQ wings or the General's Wings (General Tso's done "Guy Style"). We go BBQ, since it comes with Guy's trademark blue-sabi sauce. When our bartender comes back, we place the order. As well as another round of shots. He grabs our menus and as he turns to walk away.

"Also," I say, stopping him in his tracks, "can we get a side order of Donkey Sauce?"

The expression on my face is a second-grader politely asking the teacher if he can go to the bathroom. Taryn stifles a laugh. The bartender just sighs: "Sure."

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The shots are up just a few seconds later. They're down in even less time than that. I'm giddy as Taryn reminds me not to take any of my condescension out on the guy serving us. "Of course not," I come back. "He's suffering enough."

The scene around us is exactly what I expected. This place is basically a high-concept, branded-all-to-hell sports bar packed with every shade of white. We take a couple of pictures and immediately post them to Facebook and Instagram, because this is the kind of thing we just have to share, and after a while our food arrives -- a long plate of buffalo wings that are in reality drumsticks, which is fine. The menu promised they'd be frenched, which means the meat would be cut away from the lower part of the bone, but since nobody here is a classically trained chef the way Guy Fieri secretly is, he just calls them "lollipops." Either way he's full of shit, since these drumsticks are neither frenched nor lollipopped -- nor whatever else you choose to call it. They're just your average "wings."

Still, it's the taste that matters. After marveling at the small dish of Donkey Sauce, which looks like nothing more than a slightly more off-white mayonnaise oversaturated with xanthan gum, we dig in, grab a couple of drumsticks and dip them in the other dish of Guy's legendary blue-sabi sauce. We pause briefly, both acknowledging the moment and bracing ourselves for what may be to come, then take our respective bites.

We say nothing as we chew, each probably afraid to break the silence between us (though certainly not the silence all around, given that the speaker system has switched to that contemporary country song, the one about the pick-up truck, cold beer and the girl who looks so good in tight blue jeans). After a few seconds more, our verdict.

"Actually, not bad," I say, shocked at the words coming out of my mouth.

"No," Taryn responds. "I mean, it's not the best we've ever had, but it's not terrible at all."

The brown sugar is a tasty touch and it's complemented by the slivers of scallions dressing the drumsticks. They've got a decent crispness to the outside and they're cooked nicely throughout. Maybe the biggest surprise: the blue-sabi sauce. Sure, it's a fucking ridiculous name, but maybe that's the tragedy/genius of Guy Fieri: again, he knows how to come up with good dishes when he wants to. He may have branded everything all to hell, but somewhere in there is a guy who can cook, as opposed tothe "Guy." The idea of combining blue cheese and wasabi is clever and shockingly delicious and it doesn't feel like something that defiles an entire culture. (If anything, copyrighting the fucking name is more insulting than simply mixing two benign ingredients.)  My attitude when Taryn and I eat out is that if we get an idea for something she'd like to try at home, that's a huge bonus -- and a blue cheese/wasabi combo for the Thai wings Taryn makes sounds pretty damn good.

We plow through our food, as well as a couple more rounds of shots and the small Japanese masu Guy has seen fit to stuff with vegetables. A masu is normally made for sake and the vegetables taste like they came from Sysco -- and come to think of it, so do the wings, but they're cooked decently -- but after enough Fireballs you forgive a lot. And that may be the trick to enjoying Guy Fieri's food: just tank yourself like everybody else is so you don't really give a shit. Although, it needs to be said that there's no forgiving the Donkey Sauce. It tastes worse than it looks.

We don't get much more than that, given that -- big secret -- we grabbed a small lunch not long before heading over here. (Come on, there's no way we were actually planningon setting foot in a Guy Fieri restaurant; it had to be a spontaneous decision.) We pay up, making sure to tip our long-suffering bartender well, and shuffle out into the evening, the sun having finally set. Maybe eating only one dish was no way to judge whether Flavortown really was the Boschian hellscape of food that I'd always imagined it to be, but I'm on vacation and don't want to be sick. No need to push my luck.

Besides, we're hitting Shake Shack before we pull out of town tomorrow. I already know that a simple cheeseburger from there is better than anything at Guy Fieri's Kitchen and Bar. See, when your food is that good, you don't need to brag that your restaurant is Flavortown. It just is.

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