Flavortown Food Fight is not just another Guy Fieri Food Network competition—and a really fun one!—but it’s also the second to make his metaphoric Flavortown come to life.
His long-running series Guy’s Grocery Games takes place inside Flavortown Market, a grocery store. For Flavortown Food Fight, we’ve gone even wider, as the show takes place downtown Flavortown, in restaurant kitchens that border a charming town square.
In the second episode, there was a flash when the fabric of reality frayed, and I did a double-take. I shook my head. A few seconds later, there it was again, a glimpse of another universe.
And that’s when I realized that Flavortown is actually located inside Flavortown Market. 
That’s quite the mindfuck!
Could that even be possible? Do the laws of physics allow this? So, as I did with my not-award-winning 2022 Big Bad Budget Battle filmed on the Guy’s Grocery Games set? An investigation, I spent literal minutes investigating this, along with my research staff:
Some quick background: Guy’s Grocery Games was originally filmed in a real Los Angeles grocery store, as Food Network confirmed.
But in season two, moved to Santa Rosa, California, Guy’s hometown, where a fully functioning—but not public, of course—grocery store was built inside a 15,500 square foot warehouse. (The store was designed by Scott Storey, who also designs the Big Brother house. Read my interview with him about GGG.)
That show doesn’t film year-round, so it makes sense the space would be used for other shows.
This isn’t the first time another show has filmed in Flavortown Market. Ree Drummond’s Big Budget Battle, a short-lived series, also filmed there. It pretended to have the chefs get in a car and go to that grocery store—but the cooking and judging stations were already inside the store.
And that brings us to Flavortown Food Fight. In episode two’s second challenge, which takes place in the fine-dining kitchen, the camera pans across the kitchen and we can see the top of the wall. Above it: another wall!
That’s where I noticed something on the wall, which looked like the top of an S. In a second shot, there’s more of another shape visible.
To YouTube I went—I told you this investigation was far-reaching and spared no expense!—and coincidentally found an episode that includes Maria Mazon, who’s also in Flavortown Food Fight’s second episode.
As you watch, look behind Nini as she plates, and you’ll see a SHOP FRESH sign. And the top of the SH are identical:
Because the angles and distances are different, there’s a bit of distortion, but I’m confident enough to say that’s the same wall. And if that’s not convincing enough, what about if I said I was so confident I’d be a whole quarter on it?
Get ready to really have your mind blown: Tournament of Champions also takes place in the same space. Kind of like triple-G, TOC filmed its first season in an empty Ikea in the Los Angeles area—the same Ikea that hosted Floor is Lava. But then it, too, moved to Santa Rosa, to the same warehouse-turned-soundstage.
Just look at the floor in these two images, which is identical, though lit differently. However, TOC set’s walls are high enough to conceal any glimpses at grocery store remnants:
So there you have it. The space-time continuum allows for the convergence of different parts of Guy Fieri’s Universe of Flavortown to appear in the same place: one warehouse in Northern California.
You can see photos of that empty warehouse, before the wormhole opened, on Food Network’s site. They very clearly show the same concrete floor pattern, though it’s obviously been treated since then.
And truly, I am in awe of television set designers’ and builders’ abilities to transform big, empty boxes into completely believable and functional spaces. It’s bonkers for me to think about how, in a single soundstage on the Paramount lot in Los Angeles, Sunset Boulevard, Rear Window, The Graduate, Coming to America, Ghost, and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. What will Flavortown Market host next?
