Everything We Know About Guy Fieri's Restaurant Hustle Sequel
With the holidays taking over our consciousness, you might have forgotten that Guy Fieri's new documentary feature launched this week. Fortunately, chef pal Marcus Samuelsson didn't forget to send off a Tweet on December 28 to remind everyone: "The restaurant industry continues to be hit hard by the pandemic, so I'm grateful to my good friend @GuyFieri for doing a follow-up to his amazing #RestaurantHustle documentary. Restaurant Hustle 2021: Back in Business premieres tomorrow at 7pm on the @FoodNetwork!"
As a press release announcing the project back in February 2021 explained, this is a special sequel to last year's "Restaurant Hustle 2020: On the Line" film. In that piece, Fieri followed Marcus Samuelsson, Antonia Lofaso, Maneet Chauhan, and Christian Petroni in their attempts to keep their businesses going while the world was in the midst of a pandemic that — to put it mildly — discouraged eating out. This time around, we'll see the same chefs a year later as they try to regain the ground lost during all the disruption.
If you missed last year's special, you can watch it now on Discovery+, with the new 2021 update likely to appear on the platform too.
The special was filmed in January 2021 but still echoes the current climate
The "Restaurant Hustle 2021" documentary sequel was filmed during the early rounds of mass vaccination, per Fansided, who notes the story beings again in January 2021 "as the chefs try to get their restaurants back to a full house again." And though it's being released during the surge of the Omicron variant, the same problems in the dining industry still exist.
Many restaurants all over the country are closing again due to the variant, as seen in Eater's coverage of the New Orleans dining scene, Denver Post's roundup, and Grub Street's assessment of the scene in New York City, showing just how relevant Fieri's sequel is to the times we are currently living in, with COVID not slowing down any time soon. As Dr. Fauci told CNN recently, "Given the size of our country — and the diversity of vaccination versus not vaccination — [it's] likely [there] will be more than a couple of weeks [until cases peak] ... probably by the end of January."
In other words, the context in which "Restaurant Hustle 2021: Back in Business "premiered more eerily resembles the situation of the previous special than the conditions in which it was recorded, and hopefully if there is a next installment, it will show the restaurant industry — and the country — back to enjoying normal activities like dining out.