Guy Fieri - Guy Fieri Family Food: 125 Real-Deal Recipes--Kitchen Tested, Home Approved

To Peter Price,

a great uncle, brother, father, husband, and man.

Thanks for always putting our family first.

We love and miss you.

Contents

Ryder tells me if he doesnt make it in the NBA he will become a chef. Nice to have such great options (lol).

W hen our kids were young, my wife, Penny, and I closed up our saddle shop in Ferndale, California, every evening by five thirty and headed home to cook dinner. Almost every night Guy and his younger sister, Morgan, were home at six to set the table and eat dinner. We were lucky to live in a town with a one-block-long Main Street that had everything from a bank to a grocery store, so we could stop on the way home to pick up whatever provisions we needed and still have dinner on the table before the sun set.

By the time he was in middle school, Guy was making dinner at least a couple of nights a week. This was less because of a blossoming passion for cooking than because of a household rule that excused whoever made dinner from washing the dishes afterward. A rule that did not exist, by the way, until Penny and I noticed that every evening at the same time our son suddenly had an urgent need to see a man about a horse, if you know what I mean. These bathroom visits would last just long enough for the final pot to be dried and put away.

Now, I know that if Guy were writing this, hed say that making dinner himself was the only way he could get an alternative to his parents forays into macrobiotic and vegetarian cooking, and that learning to cook was the result of a finely tuned survival instinct. Im here to set the record straight: Guy Fieri learned to cook when he was a kid because we wouldnt let him get out of doing the damn dishes every night.

Guy is not the first in our family to learn to cook out of necessity, no matter how broadly that term is defined. The traditions of Guys two grandfathers reverberate every day in the life that he and Lori have built for themselves and their boys. My father, Louis Angelo Ferry (it was he who Anglicized Fieri, our original surname, in the 1930s), was effectively orphaned at the age of two when his mother died. This was at a time when widowed fathers didnt typically take up the mantle and raise their kids alone, so Louis bounced around among various family members for a while, and eventually landed with his uncle, Zio Amelio (zio is Italian for uncle).

It was no soft landing by todays standards. For a while he traveled and worked with Amelio, then with a cook for an Ohio road crew. Louis left school after finishing the sixth gradenot so unusual in 1920s Appalachiaand he and Amelio became coal miners. By the time he was a young man, Dad was making his living as a traveling salesman. I guess being on the move was second nature to him by then. When he was home on weekends hed cook enough to get him through several days out on the road.

On the other side of the family, Pennys dad, Henry Price, also grew up poor. He put himself through law school at Emory University by working in food prep and made his living thereafter as a lawyer. For decades, his method of making dinner went something like this:

6:00 P.M. : Think about fixing dinner.

7:00 P.M. : Go to store for ingredients for dinner.

8:00 P.M.: Return to store to pick up ingredients forgotten during first trip to the store.

9:30 P.M. : Wake the kidsits time to eat!

It reminds me just a little of a guy I know well, although our Guys timing is more civilized... at least on most nights. And when he knows travel is coming thats going to keep him away from home, the sight of Guy cooking up a storm to keep Lori and the kids going for a few nights without him is like going back through time and catching a glimpse of my dad preparing enough food to keep him sustained during a busy week on the road.

So Guy didnt fall far from the family tree when it comes to habits or timing, but neither did he miss the lessons Penny and I tried to impart, Im happy to say. In spite of his well-known affectionate ribbing about the krazy healthy food we allegedly forced our kids to eat, today he has a profound respect for all kinds of food, a deep understanding of food systems, and an innate sense of how crucial it is to treat food and eating with respect, so that we can foster the social interactions that are the lifeblood of family and friendships.

People often ask Penny and me, Arent you proud of what Guy has done? If theyre asking about his material success, I dont think he ever explicitly strove for that part. The truth is that when Guy was a kid he never fully realized how little money we had, or that there were things we couldnt do because we were being frugal and saving. I dont think our children noticed because we were privileged to live in a small town where everyone seemed to know and look out for everyone else, and there was always a helping hand for a person in need. It was the kind of place where being home to eat dinner with your family every night instead of going out to eat all the time or spending your money on big trips was simply what people did.

That nightly ritual of family dinner allowed Penny and me to really know our children, and them to really know us. The kids heard a lot from us about love, respect, humility... and the lasting benefits of compounding interest. The connection between these might not seem obvious at first, but I firmly believe in imparting to kids a healthy respect for the money they can earn and an understanding of what they can do with it. If you treat your money wisely and well, then someday you might be able to help someone out who really needs it, and thats really the crux of it all, isnt it?

For his part, Guy has let his insatiable interest in food and cooking and his instinctive generosity lead him in a direction that actually benefits other people. He was doing this from the time he opened his very first restaurant, when Penny and I used to think he spent as much time coaching and counseling employees who came to him with personal concerns as he did managing them at their jobs. But those humble beginnings put him on his current path, where among other things he is able to shine an extraordinarily large spotlight on a lot of mom-and-pop restaurants across the country, giving many of them a chance at a level of success they wouldnt otherwise have.

So, ask me whether Im proud of all that Guy has done to use his hard-earned platform day and night to help people, and Ill say yeah, Im phenomenally proud of my sonnot just for that, but because hes never lost sight of whats most important in life: family, friends, and the art of eventually getting dinner on the table. Thats a legacy any father would be proud of.