The question landed in twenty inboxes at once: if the world ended tomorrow, what would you eat? Nick DiGiovanni, the chef who has been yelled at by Gordon Ramsay over French macarons and lived to perfect them, took every answer seriously enough to cook all of it, then called in his friend Guga to help eat through the wreckage. What followed was one of the most revealing food portraits of the internet’s biggest creators, rendered in soup dumplings, ghost pepper pizza, and at least one bag of Taco Bell that genuinely upset everyone in the room.
The meals that earned their place at the top
Kai’s request arrived as a set of instructions, and it was the most disciplined brief of the entire project. Baked mac and cheese, lamb chops cooked medium, sliced carrots and broccoli, a big cup of sweet tea with ‘nice ice’, and a cheesecake finished with berries. Nick held a piece of the clearest ice he could source up to his face so his eyes showed through it. Guga, whose benchmark for meat is essentially professional, called the lamb ‘perfectly cooked, nice and juicy’, then declared the combination of mac and cheese alongside it ‘the right one’. The meal earned the only S-Tier of the first half: nothing crazy, just every texture and temperature thought through.
Celine, whose Belgian roots produced chicory gratin, cheese croquettes, mashed potatoes, and Belgian waffles, earned the second S-Tier and arguably surprised Nick the most. The chicory gratin, ham rolls baked inside a blanket of cheese sauce, stopped him cold. ‘That is one of the best things I’ve had this whole year,’ he said, reaching for a second bite before Guga had finished his first. He called it Belgium’s own version of mac and cheese or lasagna, and meant it as the highest compliment. Mark Rober, who submitted four of the hardest dishes on earth in what Nick confirmed was a deliberate prank, received A-Tier anyway, because soup dumplings that take three hours for a single plate, a Beef Wellington 2.0, a cheese souffle eaten before it fell, and hand-piped French macarons are still very good food regardless of motive.
The meals that fell short, and the one that caused a scene
Airrack requested a Beefy 5 Layer Burrito and a Beefy Gordita Crunch, both with chicken swapped in, plus Diablo Sauce and a Baja Blast. Nick and Guga agreed immediately: F-Tier. What they did not expect was Airrack himself materializing from somewhere near the shelving, having hidden there for the duration of the shoot. ‘I was blended in as a bag of rice up there,’ he explained. He had brought confetti poppers. The rating did not move.
Preston’s meal was genuinely regional and specific: chicken fried steak with cream gravy, a real mocha made with dark chocolate, blackberry cobbler with ice cream, and fried okra. The steak and cobbler were strong. The okra undid all of it. Guga said it tasted like grass. Nick said grass that had been stepped on by a slimy shoe. D-Tier.
Ryan Trahan’s B-Tier was affectionate. A cheeseburger with ketchup and no vegetables whatsoever, salmon nigiri with fresh wasabi, tiramisu, and a root beer. Nick noted that Ryan subsists largely on burgers and chicken nuggets, and expressed genuine amazement that he even knew what tiramisu was. Guga said the meal was very good but not extravagant enough for the last day of human civilization. The rating stood.
One plate that never got finished
The alfajores Fede requested sat on the counter after the milanesa and the pumpkin-mashed potato blend were cleared: a stack of delicate Uruguayan cookies filled with dulce de leche and coated in chocolate, crumbling at the first bite into something Guga described as breaking apart ‘literally in your mouth’. The meal around them was honest and small, a straightforward return to roots. It was not quite enough for the occasion. C-Tier.
Back at the tier list, Dude Perfect’s axis deer tenderloin and chili skillet queso sat without a drink or a dessert, which cost them the A-Tier they might otherwise have earned. The deer, thin-sliced and seared, had no marbling, so Guga introduced the fat anyway by dragging each piece through the skillet queso. It worked. It was just incomplete.
