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It's been over two years since Gordon Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares featured Amy's Baking Company on his reality show, an infamous episode whose highlights included the owners screaming at customers and keeping tips from their servers. Even Ramsey found them hopeless. And now, the couple behind the Scottsdale restaurant are closing down their eatery.
Amy Bouzaglo told the Associated Press that she and her husband, Samy Bouzaglo, are selling their property, but they still plan on keeping the business alive by selling desserts to local restaurants and making online instructional cooking videos. (If anyone remembers, one of the problems featured on Kitchen Nightmares was that the couple was serving frozen food disguised as fresh, so...)
And contrary to what everyone may suspect, they say they're not closing because of the horrible media firestorm that ensued after that episode aired. She told the Phoenix Business Journal that they are moving out because they want to get out of the spotlight and because of disputes with their former landlord over some weird odors coming from the shopping center they're located in.
After the Kitchen Nightmares episode aired on Fox, Yelp justice took over, and people took to the review site to slam the restaurant, giving them 1-star reviews. (They're back up to 3 stars now.) And then there were all the profanity-laced, all-caps type of responses sent to the angry commenters coming from their Facebook and Yelp pages that made things look even crazier. Amy still contends that they were hacked.
