In October 2017, Guy Fieri woke up in Santa Rosa, California, to a wildfire at his door. His family evacuated in the middle of the night, his house survived, and within days he was parked outside an evacuation center with a smoker, cooking for people who had lost far more. Nine years later he is still showing up at fire camps.

Out of the House at 2 A.M.

Fieri's wife noticed the smoke at about 2 a.m. on Monday, October 9, 2017. The family grabbed pictures, loaded the kids and the dogs, and left.

Their house, a block and a half from a devastated neighborhood, did not catch fire. The Press Democrat reported that the older ranch-style home he owns with his wife, Lori, was spared.

A Smoker Behind the Veterans Memorial Building

By Thursday morning he had arrived at the evacuation center in Santa Rosa with a trailer, a crew, a wood-fired oven and a barbecue smoker. The kitchen went up in the parking lot behind the Veterans Memorial Building.

The first day's menu was pulled pork and chicken with sides, and he estimated about 1,200 lunches and 2,500 dinners.

The numbers climbed fast. He started at roughly 1,500 to 2,000 meals a day and passed 5,000 meals a day by the weekend, about 23,000 for the week by Sunday night.

It was not a one-man show. He worked with the Salvation Army, local chefs and the nonprofit Operation BBQ Relief, and friends and family cooked around the clock. The 5,000 figure comes from Fieri's side for that joint effort and was not independently counted.

Back at the Fire Camps

He did not stop when Santa Rosa did. The Guy Fieri Foundation has since served meals during the 2018 Camp and Carr fires, the 2019 Kincade Fire and the 2020 LNU Lightning Complex fires, and the foundation says it has served more than 200,000 meals across its disaster responses. That total is the foundation's own count across all of its disaster responses, not wildfires alone.

During the 2021 Dixie Fire the foundation prepared roughly 2,200 pulled pork meals in a single day.

September 14, 2026

On Monday, September 14, 2026, Fieri and foundation volunteers served dinner at the Lucas Fire incident command base in Lake County. The Lucas Fire burned 4,128 acres.

The meal went to firefighters and law enforcement coming off the line. "You guys are the unsung heroes, and you guys deserve a meal like this," Fieri told the crews, according to the Press Democrat.

Cal Fire posted video of the dinner, in which Fieri said the foundation's motto is serving those who serve us. The man whose own home was once in the path of a fire is still feeding the people who fight them.

Related Tags