The Restaurant Rule Guy Fieri Reportedly Won't Bend On Diners, Drive-Ins And Dives

Author, restaurateur, and TV personality Guy Fieri has a well-earned reputation as a repudiator of food snobbery who prefers to champion the kind of unpretentious, greasy-spoon eateries that often feature on his Food Network show "Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives." This does not mean that Fieri is without high standards, however. According to the head of the production company behind "Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives," there is one restaurant rule that Fieri reportedly won't bend — everything served must be made by hand.

In a 2009 interview with Heavy Table, David Page — founder and president of Page Productions, who is believed to have come up with the name for "Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives" — explained how restaurants were chosen to appear on the show: "This has to be handmade food. If it's hamburgers, it better be handmade hamburgers. It better be done from scratch. It better be made right. And it better be good." Page emphasized that this standard needed to apply to the restaurant's whole menu, saying: "It's not like we want to walk into a joint that has 75 percent frozen Sysco pre-prepared product, but they make two specials a week that will knock you on your butt. That's not good enough."

As an example of the show's standards in choosing what establishments to highlight, Page noted in the interview that their researcher had looked at 80 restaurants in Houston, Texas (where Fieri was sweating after one bite of an especially spicy burger), and whittled it down to just seven. Page said: "The reality is we're incredibly discerning about what it takes to get on the air and the first thing it has to have is real food because that's the soul of the show."

Though the source of this standard is not Guy Fieri but the head of the production company behind his show, "Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives" is replete with examples of Fieri watching with evident glee as the meal he is about to enjoy is made by hand before his eyes. At the now-closed Joe Squared in Baltimore, Maryland, Fieri observed what he described as a "crazy good" bacon and clam pizza come together, from a dough made from starter that is reputedly 200 years old to the moment the pizza emerged from the oven. 

At West Virginia's Hillbilly Hot Dogs, the whimsical junkyard known for some of the best hot dogs in the U.S. that you'll eat in an old-school bus, Fieri assisted in the preparation of the restaurant's signature ground beef sauce, which is quite literally mixed by (gloved) hand. When Fieri asked the chef about "those unconventional tools called spoons," the chef replied jokingly, "Why dirty one? More dishes to do at the end of the night." If you share Fieri's preference for food made fresh and would like to feel confident in what you're ordering when dining out, you may want to peruse our rundown of sit-down chain restaurant dishes that are made from scratch.