Diners Drive Ins And Dives

Food Network star Guy Fieri talks with customers at The Taco Bus in Tampa during a February filming session for his "Diners, Drive-Ins & Dives" show.

Food Network superstar Guy Fieri is standing in the casino at the Caesar's Windsor resort in Ontario. He's there to do a live cooking demonstration for hundreds of fans, a "food-a-palooza," as he calls it.

"We were getting ready to do the gig, and a guy came up to me and screams, 'Dude, what is up? What's goin' on?' My managers are there with me, and they're looking at my reaction. I just threw my arms around him and said, 'Nothin', dude. What's happening?' And they said, 'Did you know that guy?" And I said, "I don't know anybody here.'"

This is what it's like to be the mayor of a place Fieri calls "Flavortown, USA." With his hair colored with peroxide and teased into a pointy pineapple; his herd of tattoos, rings and earrings; and his wraparound shades that for everyone else would scream "1 o'clock hangover," Fieri is the food world's biggest, brashest star of the moment. What Savannah food maven Paula Deen is for fluffy southern belles, Fieri is for, well, everyone else. The man is a walking high-five.

If you haven't noticed him, you haven't been conscious since 2006, when he broke out after winning the second season of The Next Food Network Star, a reality show that lets cooks compete for a Food Network show.

Since then, he's gone on to host the series "Guy's Big Bite" on the network as well as the hugely successful travel show "Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives." In commercials, he's flipped burgers with the Aflac duck, delivered Ritz crackers by tractor-trailer and given dating and dining advice for T.G.I. Friday's. He's the name behind a line of Knuckle Sandwich knives and, soon, everything from sauces to sausages.

And in the ultimate confirmation of crossover appeal, NBC turned him into a game show host last year on the show "Minute to Win It." Archie Comic Books recently created a Fieri-like character named "Dude Ferrari" for a storyline about a cooking competition.

Susie Fogelson, the head of marketing for the Food Network, explained his appeal last year to The New York Times: "I haven't seen anyone connect to this range of people since Emeril," she said, citing the chef who first put the network on the map.

In February, Fieri set off a minor storm among local food fans when he cruised through the Tampa Bay area filming segments for his 'Diners" show, exposing the world to such Tampa restaurants as Taco Bus, Love's Artifacts and California Tacos to Go.

Fieri just published a new book, "Guy Fieri Food; Cookin' It, Livin' It, Lovin' It" ($29, William Morrow) that reads like The World According to Guy. In addition to recipes from his five California-based Johnny Garlic's and Tex Wasabi restaurants, the tattoo-laden book is something of a Guysonian of all things Fieri. See young Guy as a steakhouse flambe' captain. See Guy sell roadside pretzels. There's even an exact census of everything in his kitchen drawers at home.

"The whole attitude was, you might not get another shot. Might as well put anything in it that I can," he said recently by phone before his show at Caesar's Windsor.

"Lucikly I have publishers who believe in me. We went way over on amount of pages and way over on the number of recipes. I didn't want this thing stuck on some shelf with a bunch of other cookbooks. I want this thing to survive on the coffee table roster."