Guy Fieri’s DC Kitchen and Bar — where overkill is never enough (2024)

DC Mumbo wings at Guy Fieri’s DC Kitchen and Bar. (Laura Chase de Formigny for The Washington Post)

My bartender at Guy Fieri’s DC Kitchen and Bar had taken the under on the Pistons-Magic game.

I learned this fact not long after he let out a groan heard round the bar. Detroit’s point guard had just sunk a three-pointer with nine seconds left to tie the score at 106. The bar man was certain the game was headed to overtime, ruining any chance he had to collect on the C-note he had wagered that the combined score would be under 220 points. Time — and all service-related activities in my vicinity — stopped for the final seconds of the game.

[Fight Club sandwiches dissolve the line between insanity and genius]

When Orlando’s center tipped in a missed layup at the buzzer, I realized I shared something in common with the bartender: This was the highlight of the night for the both of us. He earned an extra Benjamin — or whatever the payout — while still at work. I got a secondhand adrenaline rush, which I hoped might flush my arteries after I’d been gnawing on a saucy stack of undercooked spare ribs, dubbed the American Royal, and its heaping side of mac ’n’ cheese — a 454 Chevy Chevelle Super Sport trip straight down to StentTown.

American Royal ribs at Guy Fieri’s DC Kitchen and Bar. (Laura Chase de Formigny for The Washington Post)

Guy Fieri’s DC Kitchen and Bar, much like the muscle cars that the Food Network star collects, is custom made for a particular demographic: dudes who live life loud, fast and hard. Dudes who think excess is not enough. Dudes who have yet to lie awake at night, worrying about their cholesterol count or their kids’ college fund. Fieri’s place, in other words, targets that brief slice of American life that I’ll call, for lack of a better term, the Bulletproof Years.

Fieri’s man-palace — any place that covers 18,000 square feet cannot reasonably be called a “cave” — took over food operations from Michelin-starred chef Nick Stefanelli, whose baked manicotti, Alaskan king crab legs and potato-skin nachos got kicked to the curb when Caesars Entertainment acquired the William Hill sportsbook. So keep that in mind: Fieri’s restaurant is seamlessly, hopelessly woven into the fabric of the Caesars sportsbook, the first one wedged into a U.S. professional sports facility, Capital One Arena.

Trash can nachos at Guy Fieri’s DC Kitchen and Bar. (Laura Chase de Formigny for The Washington Post)

It’s a dizzying experience when you first enter. The wall of TVs. The gambling kiosks. The guards at the entrance. The mural of Evel Knievel jumping the fountains at Caesars in Las Vegas, just seconds before his nasty spill. You sort of feel like you’ve stumbled into Biff Tannen’s Pleasure Paradise, minus the time travel back to the ’80s (unless, of course, Journey and Toto are playing next door at the arena).

[Yasmine is a kebab house inside Union Market, and so much more]

To be honest, the switch from Stefanelli to Fieri was probably for the best. If anything can compete with the emotional highs and lows of sports gambling, it is Fieri’s food, which has its own roller-coaster effects. There is the pure theater of watching your server lift the bottomless metal pitcher to reveal Guy’s trash can nachos, stacked high, like a tortilla-based version of the Vessel in Manhattan. There is the genuine rush of gobbling one chip after another — each loaded, if possible, with black beans, smoked pork, cheddar cheese, pickled red onions, cilantro, jalapeños and bourbon-brown sugar barbecue sauce — until you begin to lose all sense of self-respect. There is the inevitable crash as your body shelters in place from that tsunami of incoming calories.

The bacon mac ’n’ cheese burger at Guy Fieri’s DC Kitchen and Bar. (Laura Chase de Formigny for The Washington Post)

Fieri, 55, came into his own as a chef in the 1990s, an era when nu metal and rap-rock dominated popular culture. The music is the perfect soundtrack to Fieri’s food: dishes that are a little aggro, a little boastful and very much up in your grill. It is high-octane fuel for dudes who might mangle their bodies in a mosh pit or test the limits of their digestive systems with Guy’s bacon, six-cheese mac ’n’ cheese burger with Donkey Sauce on a garlic-buttered brioche bun.

What separates Fieri from his more hardcore peers, though, is his playfulness, this sense that he’s winking, with perfect comic timing, at the monsters he creates. Take the trash can nachos (now available on Goldbelly!), a dish he once prepared at the South Beach Wine and Food Festival, as if Fieri were suggesting that he understood better than any fine-dining chef what beachgoers really want. But I also laughed at the menu description for the “crispy pull-apart straws” — a dish that sounds almost refined — and what actually lands on the table with a thud: a jungle gym of onion rings welded together with tempura batter, then drizzled with bourbon-brown sugar barbecue sauce and sprinkled with bacon bits and scallions. I had fun tearing that playhouse down.

Guy Fieri’s DC Kitchen and Bar. (Laura Chase de Formigny for The Washington Post)

No one with Fieri’s culinary team actually labors in the kitchen at the D.C. location. All dishes are prepared by Aramark, the food service provider for Capital One Arena, whose staff follows recipes developed by the celebrity chef and his crew. As part of the transition from Stefanelli to Fieri, Aramark installed a Southern Pride gas-assist smoker in the kitchen. But based on the meats that (apparently) come out of the smoker, the crew hasn’t yet learned how to use it. The American Royal spare ribs and the Motley Que pulled pork sandwich both rely on the ubiquitous bourbon-brown sugar barbecue sauce to do the heavy lifting. I detected not a whiff of wood smoke on either.

The menu provides something of a tour through Fieri’s career, starting with the Cajun chicken Alfredo, a dish that dates back to Johnny Garlic’s, the chef’s first restaurant in Santa Rosa, Calif. I’ve not had the original, but the D.C. version was sauced within an inch of its life, the blackened chicken in danger of drowning in heavy cream. Fieri’s celebrated bacon mac ’n’ cheese burger was a 10-car pileup on the highway, with multiple casualties. If I want beef here, I’ll go with the more streamlined — at least by Fieri’s standards — American-style Kobe burger with onion jam, onion rings and three cheeses. Or the “whiskey-aged” New York strip, which was cooked to a nice shade of pink, though without any crust whatsoever.

DC Mumbo wings at Guy Fieri’s DC Kitchen and Bar. (Laura Chase de Formigny for The Washington Post)

Just like every other outsider who stakes a claim in Washington, Fieri has created his version of wings and mumbo sauce. The drumettes and flats are golden, juicy and crispy, bar-food perfection; the glaze, however, is sticky and sweet, a mumbo sauce aiming for the lowest common denominator. Despite its youth in Fieri’s orbit, the kitchen here is also test-driving dishes that could eventually roll onto other menus in the chef’s empire. The pepperoni pizza pops — puff pastry stuffed with provolone and the spicy salami, then skewered like a Popsicle — are exactly the kind of junk-food fantasia you expect from Fieri. I love them.

Pepperoni pizza pops at Guy Fieri’s DC Kitchen and Bar. (Laura Chase de Formigny for The Washington Post)

But the smoked shotgun shells? These blackened logs rest, three in a row, in a metal holder usually reserved for tacos. The shells in question are ridged manicotti tubes stuffed with cheese and andouille sausage, then wrapped in bacon, smoked and glazed with — what else? — bourbon-brown sugar barbecue sauce. They look like some sea creature that has washed ashore to die. They don’t taste much better. I ate only one. The bartender asked if I didn’t care for them.

“They’re just too much,” I said.

“Too much?” he said, clearly puzzled.

His response was totally on brand. There is no such thing as overkill at Guy Fieri’s DC Kitchen and Bar.

Guy Fieri’s DC Kitchen and Bar

601 F St. NW, inside Capital One Arena; 202-527-7139; caesars.com/sportsbooks/dc/capital-one-arena/restaurants/guy-fieris-dc-kitchen-bar.

Hours: 11 a.m. to midnight Sunday, Monday and Thursday; 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday; 11 a.m. to 1 a.m. Friday and Saturday.

Nearest Metro: Gallery Place-Chinatown, with a short walk to the restaurant.

Prices: $8 to $36 for all items on the menu.