American TV food personality Guy Fieri embarked on his new venture in September by opening up his Times Square restaurant, adventurously called Guy's American Kitchen & Bar, in New York City. Pete Wells from the New York Times took a trip down there recently and published one of the most scathing restaurant reviews in living memory. 

Wells' review is incredibly harsh and one must wonder whether the writer has harboured some long-borne grudge against the down-to-Earth, all-American foodie, and just waiting for his possibility to rock up to a Guy Fieri establishment and to have all his preconceived and condescending emotions surrounding him be confirmed. We have to say, that we judge a restaurant by the personal style of its proprieter and unfortunately therefore, this means that Fieri's bleach-blonde spiky hair, bizarre array of shirts and facial hair that only works on Chad Kroeger, all do nothing for him, in our book. And despite feeling empathetic for Guy in relation to the review, we also cannot help but be unsurprised.

Wells' letter reads like a letter to Fieri, in that it's written entirely in second person. But rather than a letter between friends, or even enemies, it is simply a long list of questions intended to truly get across how much the writer hated the restaurant. From the relatively tame questions such as "Was your deep-fried "boulder" of ice cream the size of a standard scoop?" and "How did Louisiana's blackened, Cajun-spiced treatment turn into the ghostly nubs of unblackened, unspiced white meat in your Cajun Chicken Alfredo?" to the downright rude, "Why is one of the few things on your menu that can be eaten without fear or regret... called a Roasted Pork Bahn Mi, when it resembles that item about as much as you resemble Emily Dickinson?" and, in reference to a special sauce, "when we hear the words Donkey Sauce, which part of the donkey are we supposed to think about?" 

Normally, when critics create such a stir such a strong reaction, the specific restaurant reviewed tends to go right down hill, but there are plenty of people fighting in Fieri's corner, and we suspect that this may, in fact, work to is advantage. No publicity is bad publicity, and all that jazz.