Matt Welsch, owner and chef of the Vagabond Kitchen on Market Street wants to make a full-court press to entice Food Network personality Guy Fieri to bring his “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” show to his restaurant. The show, affectionately called “Triple D” by its fans, features celebrity chef Fieri combing the United States looking for unique eating establishments, often traveling off the beaten path to feature restaurants and chefs breaking the mold.

Welsch has a history with the spiky-haired, high-energy host. He won a 2018 episode of the Fieri-hosted “Guy’s Grocery Games” in 2018. It was then that Welsch first tried planting the seed for Fieri to bring his “Triple D” traveling show to Vagabond Kitchen. Welsch said that Fieri had recently been in the Ohio Valley – his grandmother is from Powhatan Point – and Welsch pitched the idea of visiting Vagabond Kitchen, a restaurant Welsch founded after crisscrossing the U.S. on his motorcycle in 2013 exploring the country’s culinary landscape.

Fieri told Welsch to talk to his producer, who was standing nearby.

“He (the producer) kind of hemmed and hawed,” Welsch said, “and I don’t know if I really sold the idea, and I hadn’t heard anything since then.”

Welsch made a renewed push for a visit a couple of years later, but nothing came of it. He recently was sitting back and realized he was coming up on the five-year anniversary that his episode of “Guy’s Grocery Games” was broadcast.

“I was like, you know, I can’t believe it was five years since this show was on,” he said. “It’s time to reach out again, to see if we can get in touch.

“When I moved back, I had wanted to show the area what I had seen in the rest of the world,” Welsch added, “but I learned really quickly that I needed to show the rest of the world what was great about this area.”

And the story of the Vagabond Kitchen also has grown in that time. Welsch now has a YouTube channel at youtube.com/@theVagabondChefRides. There, he posts videos about things like knife basics and cooking lessons. He also has a six-video series of his own, “Recipes and Roadmaps.” There, he travels to a different West Virginia farm to learn about something grown there, from tomatoes to maple syrup. Then he takes that item and uses that as an ingredient for a meal, and shows customers’ reactions to each dish.

“What I really learned from being on the set of (Guy’s Grocery Games) is they want to tell stories, too,” Welsch said. “And that’s the biggest thing. We have a story.”

Now he’s asking people to email “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” at storyideas@tripledinfo.com to promote Vagabond Kitchen and get the restaurant back on the show’s radar. That’s worked in the past. Fieri has sometimes mentioned, as he walks into a new eatery, that viewers stuffed his inbox telling him he couldn’t pass this one up.

Welsch believes his restaurant fits the bill, serving high-end Appalachian comfort food in a downtown Wheeling working to revitalize itself. He even thinks the rough nature of the downtown streets could be part of the appeal, as Fieri could see things like the Downtown Streetscape Project helping bring the area back to life.

Welsch knows what a “Triple D” visit could do for the restaurant. He’d love to see lines wrapping around the block waiting for a seat. He thinks that could benefit the other downtown restaurants, too.

“If we can’t seat people and can’t take care of them properly, then we say, ‘sorry, you’re going to have to come back,'” he said. “Well, if we did that, those people would go up the street to Elle & Jack’s, they’d go up to Taqueria 304. It would radiate out and I think it could drastically improve the whole area.”

Welsch admits that this latest email campaign would be “a crapshoot.” It could work. It might not. Yet the only way to get on the “Triple D” radar, he said, was to make some noise.

“Who knows?” Welsch asked. “I walked in from running errands one day and my server said, ‘Food Network called.’ They found me (for Guy’s Grocery Games) on Instagram. … I 100% believe it’s possible.”