Celebrity chef Guy Fieri won’t be cooking the Thanksgiving feast for his family and friends this year, but he’ll be supervising the preparations — from a wheelchair.
The spiky-haired Food Network star was filming his new show, “Flavor Town Food Fight,” earlier this month when he fell down some stairs and tore a quad muscle on his right leg in half.
“You normally tear that muscle at your tendon or the tendon tears off the bone, but this was right in the center of the whole quad muscle and it exploded,” Fieri said in an interview with Fox News.
Fieri said he underwent emergency surgery on his injured leg and has to be off his feet until he mends. “I can’t walk on it for eight weeks,” he said.
So Fieri, famous for his “Welcome to Flavortown” slogan, is handing over the cooking reins to his sons Hunter and Ryder, and his nephew Jules, while he’s in Recoverytown.
“They all know how to cook,” he said. “And now it’s gonna be me quarterbacking from the wheelchair and telling them what to do. And we cook for about 40 people up here. So it’s going to be, it’s got to be an adventure.”
Fieri, 57, said he was on the set when he slipped down a set of steps and suddenly his legs were headed in directions nature never intended.
“One foot went forward and the other foot got caught on the threshold,” he said. “So, you know, it extended me out. I looked like I was probably doing the splits.”
Fieri said he underwent emergency surgery for an injury that amazed his doctor, and not in a good way.
“He hasn’t seen a tear in the biggest, thickest part of your quad in half,” the chef said.
So now Fieri is spending the holiday at his ranch in Santa Rosa, California, and leaving the cooking to his kids.
“My son, Ryder, texted me from school and he said, ‘Well, I guess all the training you’ve given me and all the cooking I’ve been doing while I was at school, it was going to be my time to shine,’” he said. “And I said, ‘I am so happy you’re asking me about this versus me telling you, you have to do it.”
Fieri said he knows recovery will take take time and that he will need rehab to get his leg back into shape. He said he is eager to get started.
“Eight weeks of no weight on it, crutches and a cast and then the rehab, which to me — I want to get after it as fast as possible,” he said.