How many restaurants has Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives visited?

How many restaurants has Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives visited?

Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives is one of the most popular shows on Food Network. You might have seen it once or twice (or six or seven or eight or fourteen) times during one of the countless programming strips the network has it plugged into. If it seems like the show is on almost constantly, that’s probably because Food Network knows how to capitalize on the show’s winning formula:

1) Present guilty pleasure food;
2) Use a goofball host it’s easy to identify with (and easy for haters to hate);
3) Profit.

In other words: if you’ve ever found yourself either salivating or rolling your eyes at Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives, you’ve fallen under its spell.

Triple-D has only been on the air for eight years–its premiere episode, a one-off special with the same name, aired on November 6th of 2006–but it’s already run through 22 seasons. How does that break down? Well, not every season features exactly thirteen episodes. Season Nineteen, for example, kicked off with “Guy’s Hometown Tour,” which took Fieri through some noteworthy establishments in his childhood home of Ferndale CA. It was a double episode; that season, therefore, had but a scant twelve episodes total.

And the just-completed 22nd season featured a handful of clip shows (as have other, earlier seasons), so their episode totals are a bit misleading where the total number of new restaurants is concerned. TV Guide lists a total of 233 total episodes as of the upcoming August 28th show.

As devotees of the show know, Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives generally features three restaurants per episode–but this isn’t always the case, either. Some episodes feature two restaurants, and a 2/1 split for the dishes featured at each. Other episodes have featured a whopping four (?!?) restaurants. The numbers are variable, and can be perplexing.

Based on a cross-referencing of TV Guide’s listings and Guy Fieri’s own Triple D database, here’s a breakdown of the number of restaurants Guy’s visited in each season, and the total number to this point in the run.

Season One: 12 episodes; 35 resaurants
Season Two: 13 episodes; 41 restaurants
Season Three: 13 episodes; 34 restaurants
Season Four: 13 episodes; 35 restaurants
Season Five: 13 episodes; 35 restaurants
Season Six: 13 episodes; 35 restaurants (starting to notice a pattern here)
Season Seven: 13 episodes; 37 restaurants
Season Eight: 11 episodes; 33 restaurants (This season includes an episode where Guy tailgates outside an Oakland Raiders game and has four dishes from local eateries. If you want to get excessively technical, then, he visits zero restaurants; rather, the restaurants come to him.)
Season Nine: 13 episodes; 39 restautants
Season Ten: 13 episodes; 39 restautants
Season Eleven: 13 episodes; 38 restaurants
Season Twelve: 13 episodes; 39 restautants
Season Thirteen: 13 episodes; 36 restautants
Season Fourteen: 13 episodes; 33 restaurants (This is the season when the producers started to feature two restaurants instead of three. This is also the season that features a visit to Johnny Garlic’s, which is Fieri’s own restaurant and which seems a bit like cheating.)
Season Fifteen: 13 episodes; 33 restaurants (Guy revisits “a Baltimore joint for another taste of their signature pit-beef sandwiches;” that restaurant doesn’t count in the total.)
Season Sixteen: 13 episodes; 29 restaurants
Season Seventeen: 13 episodes; 33 restaurants
Season Eighteen: 13 episodes; 35 restaurants
Season Nineteen: 12 episodes; 36 restaurants (Though one of these is an apple cider maker, which may or may not count as a proper restaurant)
Season Twenty: 5 episodes; 15 restaurants (Every restaurant is in or near Long Beach CA; Monterey CA; and Jackson WY.)
Season Twenty-One: 13 episodes; 38 restaurants
Season Twenty-Two: 13 episodes; 39 restaurants
Season Twenty-Three: 5 episodes; 15 restaurants (so far)
Total: 279 episodes; 782 restaurants

That is a lot of food. At the same time, take the 782 figure with a few grains of artisinal salt: meticulous fan site Dinersdriveinsdiveslocations.com tallies “over 800” restaurants, so it’s possible there are a few missing here and there. Just as it’s possible that we’ll never know the true total–that it, like so many other facts and figures, are simply lost to the ravages of time and dust…

Additionally, here’s one intriguing bit of Triple D trivia. Though he came of age in California, Guy Fieri was actually born and spent the first few years of his life in Columbus OH. One wonders if Guy has a bone to pick with the place, though: it’s the biggest city in the U.S. that he hasn’t visited on Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives. He’s been to Cleveland and Cincinnati, Ohio’s second- and third-largest cities, plenty of times; heck, Fieri even devoted a whole episode to Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine neighborhood just last year. But it would appear that the home of Ohio State University, Jeni’s Ice Cream, and some of the best fried meat you’ll find outside a state fair needs to do more to get back on Fieri’s radar.

As for Guy Fieri’s favorite Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives joint? That answer is easier to find:

The next-most popular question about Triple D? “How many calories has Guy Fieri consumed over the course of the show?” That is an excellent question. Anyone want to figure it out?

 

(Photo credits: How many restaurants has Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives visited via Facebook)