11 Interesting Facts You Didn't Know About Guy Fieri

Guy Fieri is one of the biggest celebrity chefs and television personalities of our time — right up there with Rachael Ray, Gordon Ramsey, or Emeril Lagasse. With over 25 television shows across the Food Network and other channels, there are few people in the United States who don't know the name Guy Fieri.

There are possibly even fewer people who wouldn't recognize his signature look: the frosted tips, a flame-print shirt, and maybe even something fried hanging out of his mouth. He's often imitated, but there's only one true Mayor of Flavortown. 

You've seen the shows, you've seen the memes, you've gotten to know him a bit since he broke out into the food scene with "Guy's Big Bite" back in 2006. But, surprisingly, there are still some things you may not know about the mega-famous food expert, like his French education or where his phrase Flavortown originated. Here are 10 surprising facts you still may not know about Guy Fieri. 

Guy Fieri's first foray into food started when he was only ten years old – sometime around 1978. According to the chef-to-be, Guy had his first soft pretzel while on a family trip to Lake Tahoe. He enjoyed it so much that his father allegedly asked him, "If you're such a fan of these pretzels, why don't you own a pretzel business when we get back home?"

The rest was Flavortown history. Shortly after returning home, Guy and his father, Jim, built a bicycle cart by hand and used it to sell soft pretzels around their small hometown of Ferndale, California. 

Guy continued selling pretzels throughout his Northern California town for six years before taking the next step in his culinary journey.  Nearly 50 years after starting his first business, the pretzel remains Guy's go-to snack of choice. He told All Recipes in 2024, "One snack for the rest of my life? Salty pretzels."

While Jim Fieri helped Guy break out into the food industry via pretzel cart, his son was admittedly not the biggest fan of his parents' cooking. "My parents were all into macrobiotic cooking and natural cooking, and my sister was a vegetarian," Guy shared during a cooking demo at the NYC Wine & Food Festival in 2011. "I wasn't down with that," (via Food Network ).

Still, Fieri certainly learned a thing or two in the kitchen from his "hippy" parents, and calls his mom his favorite granola chef. "The top cooking trick I learned from my mom is to stir and rotate your granola," he told Today in 2018, "It was a really great lesson in keeping an eye on what you're doing." 

Besides granola and pretzels, Guy admits that his family's food wasn't incredibly inspiring to him. He recalls his mother telling him, "If you don't like the way I cook, then you cook." Guy took his mom's advice to heart and hasn't stopped since. 

Much like fellow celebrity chef Carla Hall, France had a major impact on Guy Fieri's relationship with food and cooking. While it was just happenstance that Carla fell in love with food in France, Guy went with the purposeful mission to study his craft. 

At just 16, Guy Fieri moved to Chantilly, France — a small province an hour north of Paris. He saved up for more than six years, selling pretzels and washing dishes at various restaurants in Northern California in order to study abroad for a year. He claims that living in France gave him a newfound love for international foods and different ways of living that he found outside of his small town. 

In a full-circle moment, Guy brought his own son, Hunter, to France to teach him about traditional French cuisine. They documented their trip in the Food Network show, "Guy & Hunter's European Vacation." 

Guy Fieri is well-known for oversized, inventive gastronomical creations like his trash can nachos. But it only takes a little egg to stop him dead in his tracks. That's because Guy is one of the many celebrity chefs with a particular food aversion, and eggs are one thing the famous foodie just won't eat.

A bad experience with a chalky, hard-boiled egg left a ten-year-old Fieri swearing off eggs for the rest of his life — mostly. The adult Fieri admits he will still eat eggs as ingredients in other dishes, but never on their own. Years after discovering his distaste for eggs and finding his culinary career, Guy caught the Food Network up to speed by saying, "There is just something about a scrambled egg, it just doesn't work. Texturally, visually, it's liquid chicken." Certainly there's no way to argue against that point. 

While he's not a fan of eggs, Guy Fieri loves this controversial dish. In fact, Guy goes as far as to say that Brussels sprouts are one of the two foods he can't live without — the other being soy sauce, which makes a perfect topping for Brussels sprouts themselves. 

He describes them as one of the most versatile vegetables. Speaking to Business Insider in 2022, Fieri said, "I love Brussels sprouts. You can do so many things with them." He also gets into why he thinks Brussels sprouts have a bad reputation and reveals that it has to do with the way we were told to cook them back in the day. "Most people don't like them because, when they were a kid, they had boiled Brussels sprouts," he says. Instead, Fieri suggests lightly tossing them in olive oil, salt, and pepper before frying, grilling, or roasting them until crispy.

Guy Fieri has been dubbed the Mayor of Flavortown, but where did the campy phrase first come from? Like many great iconic moments in pop culture history, it all started with a pizza. 

In 2017, Guy revealed to Vice the origins of his trademarked phrase, Flavortown. "On camera, I once said, 'This pizza looks like a manhole cover in Flavortown,'" he says. From there, the silly term took a life of its own. Fans posted on X (formerly Twitter)about the fictional location and made unofficial Flavortown merch. At first, the jokes were supposed to be ironic — Flavortown was a place where greasy diner food and frosted tips were the norm. It was a place that justified the loud personality and differentness of Guy Fieri's approach to cuisine. Shortly after, though, the teasing turned to a term of endearment, and Guy Fieri himself got in on the joke. 

"Some of y'all have never been to Flavortown, but that's none of my business," Guy joked on X in 2020 alongside a picture of Kermit the Frog sporting Fieri's signature frosted blonde tips. From a pizza to a popular party theme, Flavortown has evolved to something that lives inside all of us. "Of course, there's no Flavortown," Guy Fieri says in his Vice interview, "unless you believe in it."

Guy Fieri has certainly made his mark on American and international cuisine over the years. From his lone pretzel cart in Northern California in 1978, he's amassed a veritable restaurant empire.

His website lists 17 different establishments owned and operated by Guy, most of which specialize in their own cuisine. His restaurants include Chicken Guy, Guy Fieri's Smokehouse, Pig & Anchor, Guy's Sammich Joint, and Guy Fieri's Tequila Cocina. His largest chain, Guy Fieri's American Kitchen, has 17 locations alone throughout the United States, Cancun, South Africa, and Dubai. 

How does he possibly manage it all? "I have about 90 restaurants right now, the shows, two boys, 500 goats, a bunch of cars, a bunch of projects, a bunch of hobbies," he told Variety in 2022, "I'm also a little ADD — if I have 90 things going on, I feel a lot better." 

Guy Fieri has eaten some inventive concoctions in his time, but green bean casserole, the classic American comfort food, remains his favorite for the holidays. This dish is a must-have Thanksgiving side dish for Guy, but he only likes it a certain way. 

"I am a big green-bean-casserole guy," Guy told Eating Well in 2022, "but not the way that everybody typically does it." He reveals that his casserole recipe takes two whole days, skipping the canned cream of mushroom to make a homemade gravy out of his own cremini mushrooms. "I don't want my beans soggy," he says, "I want nice crispy fried shallots on top of it." That certainly sounds like it beats canned green beans and leftover fried onion toppings.

Guy's homemade green bean casserole definitely takes more time and effort than the easier canned version, but the result is well worth it. Try it out at your next Thanksgiving, or really any time of year.

In February 2024, Guy Fieri threw a massive tailgate party for the Super Bowl LVIII in Las Vegas. Around 15,000 people attended his block party off the Vegas strip, which equals about a quarter of the number of people who attended the big game. The party included 25 restaurant pop-ups, many local to Las Vegas, like Guy Fieri's establishment. The tailgate wasn't Guy's first rodeo. He previously shared his number one tip for building a not-boring party menu for large groups.

Guy's favorite food at the tailgate was his trash can nachos, which he serves at several restaurants, including Guy Fieri's American Kitchen & Bar chain. The dish is exactly what it sounds like — a tall pile of gooey nachos topped with everything you could think of between layers of crispy chips and liquid cheese — served out of an aluminum can. 

Time and again, Guy Fieri has shown that he shows up for others in need. When the disastrous Santa Rosa wildfires forced Guy and his neighbors to evacuate their neighborhood in 2017, the chef went to work setting up a mobile kitchen and feeding other displaced residents and emergency personnel.

With the help of the Salvation Army, Fieri provided thousands of meals to people in need. "It's terrible in so many ways," he told KRON at the time, "but it's wonderful to see great people coming together."

Before Guy's sister passed away in 2011 after a battle with metastatic melanoma, he created The Guy Fieri Foundation for Inspiration and Imagination. He worked to help brighten the lives of young children suffering from diseases similar to his sister's, visiting them in hospitals or inviting them to his show tapings. Guy was the recipient of Make a Wish's Chris Greicius Award for his dedication. 

Guy Fieri's family first immigrated to the United States from Italy long before the chef was born. His great-grandfather, Giuseppe Fieri, moved to the United States and changed his last name from the traditional Fieri to Ferry to assimilate with the United States culture and people of the time. 

Throughout his childhood and most of his young life, Guy was known as Guy Ramsey Ferry — his full name upon birth. It wasn't until Guy married his wife, Lori, in 1995 that a 27-year-old Guy legally changed his last name from Ferry back to the Italian Fieri to match his true heritage. Fittingly, fieri in Italian translates to proud. And Guy Fieri certainly has a lot to be proud of throughout his long and illustrious career.

Guy has traveled to Italy numerous times throughout his television career. Most notably, "Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives" took Guy to Tuscany, Italy, in 2015, where he tried fresh squid ink and went truffle hunting. Later, Guy returns to Italy with his son in episode two of "Guy & Hunter's European Vacation."