Did you know that Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl has a hotel rider? Well, neither did he! But now that he does, there’s one thing he wants on it, but apparently can’t even have.
The topic of “riders” came up for Grohl during an April 2026 interview on the Dish Podcast. Grohl noted that a concert “backstage rider” is very common, but now there are “hotel riders,” and he wasn’t aware that people had been keeping track of his “for the last 20 years.”
Grohl joked, “I had no clue. I was like, ‘I thought everybody gets the cheese plate in the humidifier.’ Like, what? But apparently that’s like specific…It was just [that] I had no clue.”
Dave Grohl had no idea he even had a ‘hotel rider’ for two decades
The rock icon then went on to recall finding this out while the Foo Fighters were touring. “We were on tour in Australia and…the person who takes care of that says, ‘Yeah, you’re hotel rider.’ She’s like, ‘You can have anything you want in your hotel room.’ I’m like, ‘Oh my god.’”
It was at this point that Grohl had to really ponder what he’d want. “I was like, ‘Well, what do other people do?’ And she’s like, ‘Just think about what you would really want in your hotel room.’ And I sat there thinking. I mean, I try to spend as little time in the hotel room as possible, but I’m like, ‘F*** what is it? What’s not in that room that I that I need?’ And then I thought, you know what would be amazing? A hot plate.”
All the man needs is a hot plate to make him happy, and I think that’s deeply respectable
Whereas other rock stars might ask for bottles of liquor or extravagant items, the drummer of grunge’s biggest band of all time wants a hot plate to cook his own food.
“Some sort of like portable kitchen so that I can, on a day off, go to the market and buy all of the ingredients to come back to my room and cook my own dinner,” he said. But c’est la vie, it wasn’t meant to be. “And so the next morning she’s like, ‘What do you think?’ And I’m like, ‘Maybe like a sterno stove and like a hot plate.” And she’s like, ‘You can’t do that.’”
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