In my experience, everyone loves Guy Fieri. Either you love him and his ridiculous TV show ironically, or you sincerely appreciate him going to out-of-the-way greasy restaurants and occasionally “exotic” places that serve “peetuhs” and gorging on what the chef is trying to make while they’re trying to make it. Either way, he’s an entertainer, and there’s no denying that. But this week, he’s accidentally entertaining the masses by virtue of programmer Bryan Mytko realizing that Fieri didn’t snatch up the domain for his own Times Square restaurant, Guy Fieri’s American Kitchen & Bar.
Mytko realized that going to guysamericankitchenandbar.com doesn’t take you to Feiri’s website. The official restaurant site is guysamerican.com, which is a shorter version of the actual name, sure, but one would think it would be common sense that if you’re a public figure you should be sure to buy ever imaginable variation of a domain to assure people who are trying to find you can find you. It’s why Google owns gogle.com. It’s why you should do the same with your business. You don’t want to wind up with someone doing to you what they did to Guy Fieri.
Oh, right. What did Mytko do? He posted a phony menu posing as the actual restaurant, with offerings like “Football: The Meal,” which consists of “warm, broken hamburgers, served in a clear plastic back encolsed [sic] in a larger, black trash bag. Thrown at you from 40 yards.” It goes on and on from there. You can imagine.
Big ups to Business Insider for scooping this story with two big-money piles of cream cheese.
David Wolinsky is a freelance writer and a lifelong Chicagoan. In addition to currently serving as an interviewer-writer for Adult Swim, he's also a comedy-writing instructor for Second City. He was the Chicago city editor for The Onion A.V. Club where he provided in-depth daily coverage of this city's bustling arts/entertainment scene for half a decade. His first career aspirations were to be a game-show host.
