Best of 2023: The Fascinating Fall of GarfieldEats and Its Eccentric Co-Founder Nathen Mazri
As readers of this website are all too aware, I am fascinated by Garfield, that Monday-hating, lasagna-loving icon of banality and mediocrity. I’m similarly mesmerized by crazed narcissists surreally devoid of self-awareness and self-consciousness who tragically and hilariously fail to understand how the world actually sees them.
I’m finally obsessed with failure in all of its forms. Heck, I have now been writing My World of Flops for SIXTEEN YEARS. Sixteen years! I turn forty-seven today. That means I have been writing this column for over a third of my life.
So you can imagine how excited I was to discover the curious existence of GarfieldEats co-founder Nathen Mazri. Mazi is a crazed narcissist surreally devoid of self-awareness and self-consciousness who tragically and hilariously fails to understand how the world actually sees him.
AND since GarfieldEats officially shut down on Christmas Eve of 2021 due to unprofitability, an inability to pay rent and Mazri losing the rights to make unprofitable Garfield-shaped pizza after Nickelodeon bought the character from creator/Garfield Eats tolerator Jim Davis it’s a spectacular, exceedingly public failure of historic proportions.
In a goodbye video in which the eccentric restauranteur is clearly holding back tears, Mazri addresses what he delusionally sees as his army of beloved fans directly and earnestly insists, “Cats are not the only ones with nine lives. Nathen Mazri has nine lives too and I’m not going to quit. But this time I had no choice. It’s time to say goodbye to GarfieldEats fanvestors. It is official. I am leaving GarfieldEats. For 14 years, Garfield has been away from the screen and I gave the world something to reminisce about.
When I started GarfieldEats I wanted to make sure that I was attentive to every detail because the FANS deserved it. Jim Davis deserved it. I’ve really been touched by the Garfield fans all over the world, people like Wyatt Duncan and Quinton Reviews, Billions, Strange Ant, Phantom. They are really determined to give their hours to promote such an IP or a cartoon like Garfield. Those are the people that need to be more recognized by the studios.
I had the privilege and honor to meet an autistic child and his mother who drove an hour and a half away to come to our restaurant. All he wanted was a photo of me with my Garfield orange suit and to order a Garfield Big Cow lasagna.
He came up to me and said, ‘I know everything about you and GarfieldEats and it started in Dubai!’ For him to know my life story with GarfieldEats in chronological order, it brought tears to my eyes. It was an unforgettable moment for me. They were so surprised and happy and the joy that I brought them, it really excited me and gave me a purpose to live.
We provided TONS of lasagna every month to the youth homeless shelter. We have provided cases of lasagnas to the Parkdale community food bank. We have auctioned one of the seven Garfield plush toys like the one you see here to sick kids’ foundation. They were a gift from 20th Century Fox.
When we closed in November 2020 during COVID lockdown it was tough. I was all alone. Out in the cold after they changed their decision from offering me a GarfieldEats retail as you saw in our Zoom call. To see it all go away in one day is tough but you gotta keep going, keep walking, head up high.
(Sarcastically) Thank you, Nickelodeon, and Viacom CBS, for this amazing Christmas gift. Bang on. At the end of the day, I am proud of my footprint in the Garfield universe. Heck, I’m in a Garfield customized orange suit! It doesn’t get better than that. I am blessed. I have gratitude and, again, I respect Nickelodeon’s decision. See, anyone can take away anything from you, your toys, your licensing agreement but they can’t take away one thing. They can’t take away your work. I AM the founder of GarfieldEats and I am proud of it. It may have been short-lived but that is my destiny and I accept it. Love me. Feed me. Don’t leave me. Thank you. Good bye.”
Despite ending his farewell video with “Goodbye” it was unsurprisingly followed by a SECOND farewell video about all that was lost when the monsters at Nickelodeon decided to take a monster dump on Mazri’s beautiful, beautiful dreams, and during Christmastime no less!
Part two opens with a clearly emotional Mazri insisting, “I really only wanted to do GarfieldEats with Jim Davis! Was that so hard to ask? But Jim sold Garfield to Nickelodeon/Viacom. There’s nothing more we can do at this point. I thought we were going to be the next McDonalds, but with cleaner food.”
Mazri wants his fanvestors to know that if Nickelodeon hadn’t pulled the license GarfieldEats would have become the McDonald’s of Canada-based cartoon-themed pizza eateries.
He insists that folks were lining up to establish GarfieldEats franchises in their home towns. In perhaps the single most self-indulgent moment in either video, Mazri hauls out an operation manual for GarfieldEats franchisees and lovingly goes through its various components.
Mazri’s words of endless self-absorption are accompanied by an inspirational score that lets us know that we should not be sad that GarfieldEats is gone but rather happy that it existed in the first place, and that for several strange years Mazri’s eatery enriched humanity through low-quality foodstuffs shaped like a misanthropic comic strip feline.
The world-class egotist sits in front of a giant Garfield plush whose smug expression seems to mock his pain. While Mazri copes poorly with the death of his stupid, stupid dream, we see images from happier times when GarfieldEats still radiated all the promise in the world.
This includes a heartbreaking shot of Mazri hugging one of those giant plush monstrosities with an animal hunger and desperation that suggests that he thinks that if he just holds on tight enough his nightmare will be over and he can get his dream back.
In GarfieldEats promotional material Mazri shamelessly pimps the concept of “Entergagement”, a portmanteau combining engagement and entertainment. Mazri tried and failed to make “entergagement” happen but more than anything he failed to make Nathen Mazri happen as anything beyond a weird obsession for oddballs like myself.
The purpose of GarfieldEats was always to make Nathen Mazri famous. Everything else was clearly a secondary consideration.
In a world where Steve Jobs and Elon Musk are pop idols with millions of fans, why shouldn’t a flashy young businessman with a hard-on for making up stupid new words and a bottomless capacity for self-promotion become a superstar as well?
What Mazri fails to understand is that Jobs and Musk were both EXTREMELY SUCCESSFUL IN BUSINESS and made products that legitimately changed the world. Mazri, in sharp contrast, tried to sell pizzas shaped like a cartoon cat and failed. He also tried to sell himself. He was just as staggeringly unsuccessful.
As part of his branding blitz a man perversely intent on making himself, rather than the wildly popular pop icon Garfield, the face and voice of GarfieldEats made a pilot for a GarfieldEats-themed reality show that I desperately wish had been picked up so that I could watch it every week to get my fix of Mazri craziness.
Love Me, Feed Me, Never Leave Me with Nathen opens with shots of Mazri putting on his LEGENDARY Garfield orange suit, complete with matching pocket square and heading to GarfieldEats.
After Mazri introduces himself and an orange cat named Garfield Mazri a narrator gives his bona fides:“Nathen Mazri has done it all: jet-setting around the globe, founding and selling his own ad agency at TWENTY-FOUR! Studying ACTING alongside RYAN GOSLING! He’s produced films, written books and innovated in the new business world. His excellent leadership skills and instant likability have helped him gain over 170,000 Instagram followers. But the most exciting challenge is still in store for Nathen: running the hottest Garfield-themed restaurant in the world!”
After Love Me, Feed Me, Never Leave Me with Nathen Mazri insists that Mazri is INSTANTLY likable with EXCELLENT leadership skills it then illustrates that, actually, Mazri has TERRIBLE leadership skills and is EXTREMELY unlikable.
“I’m walking into the store and I’m thinking about the customer experience. It has to be INTERGAGING” Mazri tells the camera with a look of delight that suggests that all the Mazri-heads are going to lose their shit when they hear him say his beloved catchphrase “intergaging.”
The goal of Love Me, Feed Me, Never Leave Me with Nathen Mazri is to sell GarfieldEats and the Nathen Mazri brand, if not necessarily in that order. Yet reality television angrily demands conflict, drama and larger-than-life personalities.
So a reality show created to sell Garfield-shaped pizza kicks off with Mazri being apoplectic that the restaurant is in terrible shape.
He’s enraged that Michelle, the manager of the store, did not read the operations manual he gushed about in the second farewell video. Mazri only half jokingly complains that his employee has not memorized the operations manual and consequently is not able to anticipate his angry demands before he makes them.
Michelle is a blunt, no-nonsense Asian woman for whom working at GarfieldEats is clearly just a job, and a monumentally shitty one at that.
“Michelle is a know-it-all. But does she? That’s the problem. She doesn’t know it all.” Mazri tells a camera he obviously adores but that does not love him back.
Michelle clearly just wants to do her job, get paid and go home but she’s miscast here as Mazri’s comic foil.
Mazri sees himself as a ubiquitous reality television archetype: the eccentric and demanding boss who is loving and supportive behind their brusque exterior, a blowhard with a heart of gold.
The entrepreneur is eccentric and demanding, alright, but judging from his behavior here he’s a discrimination lawsuit waiting to happen rather than the kind of lovable dreamer whose enthusiasm is infectious and irresistible.
The next employee we meet who just barely tolerates his boss is Devon, a boyishly handsome young white man whose name Mazri continually mispronounces.
“Devon is typical Hollywood! Blonde, caucasian and blue eyes! Well, you know what? He’s going to be in the front because he SELLS!” Mazri relates with an unfortunate excess of honesty.
“Sometimes I think Nathan favors me because I’m white and I don’t know how I feel about that.” Devon reflects with just as much unwise candor.
After gushing about how much he prefers his handsome white male employee to his female employee of color he then gushes about Garficcinos, GarfieldEats’ signature coffee drink.
From Mazri’s ecstatic expression you’d think that the special ingredient in each Garfuccino is a little splash of pure MDMA or liquid Adderral.
“Am I trying to take them to self-actualization? They won’t get there” Mazri quips amidst clips of him haranguing Michelle about seemingly every facet of the restaurant’s operation.
Mazri seems perversely intent on showing the world that his employees are incompetent, lazy grouches. When he’s not making Michelle’s life a living hell Mazri is holding court with his fans.
“Nathen’s fans mean well but they can be pretty strange” Devon observes with exquisite understatement.
Re-watching Love Me, Feed Me, Never Leave Me I got the sense that the poor unfortunate soul cursed with having to edit Mazri’s vanity project shares Michelle’s hatred of Mazri and set out to make him look as bad and ridiculous as possible.
For example, when Mazri talks about his super-fans a series of tweets are shown, the last of which says, “When are you going to show hole, bro?” If someone is legitimately one of your fans, they’re probably not going to take to social media to inquire when you’re going to publicly reveal your anus.
“You know, those fans are everything to me. Can you believe it, someone on Instagram says ‘“Nathan you’re a hero for bringing Garfield back. It’s been ten years he’s been away. And to bring it in the form of a restaurant. I’m creating some kind of movement I know nothing about.” Mazri observes modestly.
Love Me, Feed Me, Never Leave Me with Nathen Mazri closes by teasing further episodes that, alas, would never come to fruition, including one where he grills a black employee on what he thinks about Black Lives Matter and talks about how race doesn’t matter to him.
The failed reality show about a failed business confusingly tries to promote Mazri’s brand as a rich, red-hot, iconic global disrupter by showing him harassing two employees at a small, nearly empty Toronto restaurant.
The end of GarfieldEats somehow did not mark the end of Mazri’s desperate attempts to exploit the restaurant whose failure will follow him until his dying breath.
He introduced a line of GarfieldEats NFTs that are even more spectacularly ugly and egregiously unnecessary than most.
Mazri’s brand during the heyday of GarfieldEats was nostalgia, capitalism, entrepreneurship and pop culture. The death of GarfieldEats seem to have hit him hard.
The GarfieldEats co-founder’s Twitter feed is full of interactions with MAGA extremists, conspiracy talk and sentiments like, “Nothing matters anymore! Holidays, work, love, dreams, groceries, vacations...Nothing matters. 2023 will be a deep soul awakening or just transforming to Zombies” and “In 2023 the USA wants to abolish all religions accelerating the artificial second coming and believing in The Reset. Stay woken.”
Sounds like someone could use a Garfuccino and a hug! In an even stranger, even more unfortunate twist Mazri decided to get revenge on the haters he holds responsible for GarfieldEats downfall with a bewildering “adult comedy podcast” called Nathfield.
It’s hard to talk about Nathfield without sounding insane because it’s less a conventional podcast than a morbidly fascinating expression of its creator’s free-floating delusions.
Mazri managed to fit an extraordinary amount of craziness into three short episodes chronicling the all-out spiritual war between trolling, entrepreneur-hating figures of darkness and the title character, a bizarre, embarrassing mutation of Garfield and Nathen Mazri that alternately suggests a superhero and a new messiah for the internet age.
Nathfield is Mazri uncensored, unfiltered and out of his goddamn mind. It’s an ugly, coarse stream of consciousness rant that touches upon Mazri’s hatred of Justin Trudeau as well as his contempt for Mindy Mindy Kaling, who he holds responsible for destroying the Scooby-Doo brand.
“Natfield is our sole savior and warrior with cattitude! In today’s digital war on earth no one can save us but Nathfield, the Prince of Nazareth!” seethes an angel named Gabby of Nathfield.
Nathfield works as the proprietor of a restaurant called NathfieldEats and devotes his time to eating cheese and fixing his hair. This separates him from Garfield, who doesn’t care about his hair and enjoys lasagna, a dish made with cheese.
“The corruption of this world is vast and deeply ingrained in the fabric of society. At the heart of this corruption are the elites, those who hold power and influence and who use it to enrich themselves at the expense of the common people. These elites are driven by greed and a lust for power and they will stop at nothing to maintain their hold on society. They use their wealth and connections to buy politicians and to manipulate the media in their favor. They are the ones that dictate the policies that govern our lives. And they do so not for the benefit of the people but for their own personal gain” Garthfield rants in a dour monologue that incoherently summarizes Mazri’s paranoid, conspiracy-minded worldview.
Mazri, incidentally, comes from a wealthy family involved in franchising chains like Mr. Sub. So while he may present himself as a charismatic dreamer who set out to shake up the world with an idea as crazy as it is inspired—selling Garfield-shaped pizzas to customers who demand mediocrity in all forms—he’s really just a child of wealth and privilege who went into the family business and failed.
What’s next for Mazri? A new business called Scooby-DooEats, of course (seriously). If Mazri follows his template for GarfieldEats he’s sure to have another big success or another spectacular garbage fire of a business for rubberneckers like myself to become unhealthily obsessed with.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Fiasco
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