Marvel At Tween Guy Fieri And His First Business, The Awesome Pretzel Cart

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By  Grace Perry

The Takeout is a place to unapologetically love delicious food. And therefore, it's a place to unapologetically love Guy Fieri. The host of Food Network's Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives is the high emperor of the sloppy, the fried, the undeniably delicious good eats all across America. Thus, amidst all the terribleness happening in the world today, let us take a moment to appreciate the splendor that is a tween Guy Fieri and his pretzel cart. Behold:

We're as shocked as you are that the creator of Donkey Sauce did not emerge from the womb with his iconic, spiky, bleached blonde 'do.

Yesterday, CNBC ran a story about Guy Fieri's childhood pretzel cart. Now, is any of this new information? Certainly not. Are all his quotes from old interviews? Yes, save for one in a new profile in Variety, in which he repeats the same anecdote he's been peddling for years. Is it precisely the content we so desperately need in these trying times? Absolutely. Anyway, one summer when Guy was 10, the Fieri family went on vacation to Lake Tahoe. There, he ate his first soft pretzel; it was love at first bite. "If you're such a fan of these pretzels," Guy recalls his dad saying, "why don't you own a pretzel business when we get back home?'"

And so he did. Well, he first asked the Lake Tahoe vendor who his pretzel supplier was, and the vendor refused to share his source, perhaps already sensing the power to sell trash that this small Guy had. Fieri was dismayed, but the young entrepreneur overcame this hurdle to run his soft pretzel cart for five years. He reached his goal to make enough money to study abroad in Chantilly, France for a year of high school (that's seriously impressive!), where he fell even more madly in love with culinary culture. The rest, as they say, is funkalicious history.

This has been your quarterly reminder that Guy Fieri, mayor of Flavortown, is canonically The Best.

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