The past month has been a whirlwind of "fine dining" and "oh my god, what did I just put in my mouth." I ate, for the first time, at a Michelin star restaurant: Hugo's in Berlin. It was exquisite. I ate at Roy Choi's new restaurant, Best Friend, in Las Vegas. It was the best Korean food I have had in a very long time. I ate at Baran's 2239, one of my favorite restaurants in the world. Kin and I decided we'd celebrate our one-year / ten-year anniversary there (one being married; ten years together). We flew to Hermosa Beach for the weekend just to do so, but also making sure we found time to eat a burrito at Hermosa Mexican Cuisine, the best Mexican food in the South Bay.

I should have taken better notes about the delicious food I ate, about how it tasted: there was the tiny ice-cream cone of steak tartare at Hugos that opened the meal, but I can't remember what sat on top -- a little dollop of green; there was the elk chop at Baran's, cooked to absolute perfection, but I can't recall the sauce -- pesto, perhaps, but not one made with basil; I didn't make note of the adjectives I'd use to describe the spicy pork and kimchi at Best Friend other than "second only to Mun's," a Korean woman that Kin and I befriended years ago in Redondo Beach.

But I can conjure up all sorts of details about the worst meal I have ever had in my life. I should have known better. Pete Wells warned us. Nonetheless, we ate at Guy Fieri's Vegas Kitchen and Bar.

We didn't eat a meal there, but rather a late night snack. (We'd had dinner earlier that evening at Momofuko -- our second time there and underwhelming both times.) We wanted to drink more and to people watch, but we were tired of walking around, and Guy Fieri's restaurant was in our hotel. We took a seat on the outdoor patio under a heat lamp, ordered a bottle of red wine, and chose something simple from the menu to eat and soak up the alcohol: nachos.

They were called "Trashcan Nachos," to be precise -- a name that should have served as a warning. They came out of the kitchen on what looked like a school lunch tray, with a smear of orange cheese sauce on the bottom and a metal can sitting on top of them. "Are you ready?" the chef asked theatrically, lifting up the can off the tray to reveal the chips and meat and cheese and BBQ sauce and pico de gallo that had been stuffed into it. The nachos collapsed in a vomitous heap.

The presentation was gimmicky, and I could have forgiven the establishment if what ended up on the tray was actually edible. But it was not. The chips were stale. The cheese sauce was akin to something that gets squirted onto food at a baseball park. The pico de gallo was not freshly made. The BBQ was cloyingly sweet, with nothing spicy in that salsa to offset it. But worst of all, the meat was rancid. It tasted like it had been destined for the trashcan but instead ended up in our mess of nachos.

There is an art, I think, to enjoying nachos. You have to balance the ingredients on each chip, not only so that each bite is perfect but that each ingredient lasts until the end. You don't want to run out of chips; you don't want to run out of toppings. There was no way to assemble a perfect bite of Trashcan Nachos, because there was nothing on the tray that was worth biting into. Even if one carefully avoided the meat, there was still the BBQ sauce to contend with. The cheese sauce was still not bueno. The chips were still stale.

How the hell do you fuck up nachos? I think Pete Wells' epic review of Guy Fieri's Times Square locationprobably answered that: the man has never tasted the food his restaurants churn out. He's a celebrity, not a chef. Guy Fieri is a brand, not an endorsement -- and that's awkward, as I'd never want my name associated with such embarrassingly terrible food, no matter how much money I was paid.

And people pay Guy Fieri -- even if it's indirectly -- to eat at his restaurants. I mean, we did. And what's funny is that the tab at a shit-hole like that was pretty close to the tab at much better places.