Donkey Sauced

Here’s the Greatest, Fakest Guy’s American Kitchen Parody Website Ever

Is the Hobo Lobo Bordello Slam Jam fresh tonight?
Is the Hobo Lobo Bordello Slam Jam fresh tonight? Photo: Guy’s American Kitchen and Bar

“Guy Fieri didn’t register his restaurant’s domain name,” a Brooklyn-based programmer named Bryan Mytko tweeted yesterday, “so I picked it up. I think this new menu look great.” Indeed. The fake menu that’s now parked proudly at the spoof site Guy’s American Kitchen and Bar now proudly offers “Panamania!,” a boisterous entrée of deep-fried snake that comes with a “a printed out picture of David Lee Roth stapled on it and a sparkler sticking out of each eye,” not to mention a “side of Bud Light you have to wring out of a Hawaiian shirt.” It’s sort of like the greatest thing ever. Also, it’s a little more than depressing.

Here’s the whole thing:

Yuck.Photo: Guy’s American Kitchen and Bar

The genius of the menu, which has been tweeted more than 5,100 times since yesterday afternoon and even reached Anthony Bourdain in Montreal, is that it looks just like the real thing, and it’s most funny when it’s hardest to distinguish the genuine Fieri from the fake. What’s the difference, after all, between “Honky-Tonky Double Barrel Meat Loaded Blast” and “Motley Que Ribs”?

Mytko’s site had barely made the rounds when nitpickers on Twitter started pointing out that a very large amount of the food items and the parody menu’s jokes had been lifted from other sources. So, not funny. Doesn’t he know there are thousands of semi-employed writers out here already who are trying to make an honest dollar by ridiculing Guy Fieri? “This has been a blast,” he tweeted. “I had no idea the stuff was theirs so just giving credit.” He stepped down.

Original or not, the menu is funny. In terms of commentary, on the other hand, Mytko’s dummy site is sort of like his Not Another Teen Movie in relation to Pete Wells’s Breakfast Club of a takedown. It’s really just a reminder of how hard it is to write a truly effective negative restaurant review. Also, because there’s already a Behind the Music–worthy exegesis of how content for a fake restaurant website was created and uploaded less than 24 hours after it was uploaded, it’s perhaps the best sign yet that we all need to slow down for a second and chew our food for just a little bit longer.

Here’s the Greatest, Fakest Guy’s American Kitchen Parody Website