While only around 1/3 of the restaurants on the show remained open, if it hadn't been for Ramsay's intervention, it's safe to say that all of them would have gone under within months.
The format of the show invariably starts with Ramsay sampling the food, before he looks at the kitchen. Almost always, we see the food is subpar (to say the least). So before any of the kitchen issues are even explored, we see the end result.
Yes, but then again, he only explores the walk-in fridges and supply rooms during or after the first dinner service also exposing many customers to the terrible and, often, rotten/spoiled/aged food. One can only imagine how many customers came to that restaurant because Gordon Ramsay is there and came back home unwell, or ended up sick a few hours later.
Ramsay's angry admonishments may seem like abuse to the casual eye. But when you think about it, he's really trying to get them to adopt his mindset that these kinds of things should be absolutely intolerable to all of them.
More brilliance when you realize that most of these restaurants are in trouble because the owners/chefs are in serious denial about the true problems. Customers will "vote with their feet" rather than face an ugly scene in public, and staff tends to stay quiet out of fear of losing jobs, which only allows the issues to fester in silence. By his anger and F-bombs, Gordon brings the dirt out into the open where it can't hide anymore, forcing them to confront it. The first step to healing is admitting the problem …
Gordon is also quite pointedly never loud and angry with people unless they deserve it; he's more often than not calm, complimentary and caring toward servers and kitchen staff — who are not terribly likely to have a lot of says in how poorly the restaurants are run. He justifiably calls out managers, owners, and chefs who are often the root of their issues or at the very least not helping matters.
It's a thing not often thought about: when you work in a restaurant, you are responsible for things other human beings will put into their bodies. It's more than artistry, more than allergies and expiration dates, more than making sure your customers have a pleasant dining experience. When people come into your restaurant, they are trusting you with their physical health. Take. That. Shit. Seriously.
From the Amy's Baking Company episode:
In her Reddit AMA, waitress Katie was asked why she isn't suing Samy and Amy for her tips. She answers she only worked for them for a couple of weeks and this tiny amount of money isn't worth the hassle. This answers why Samy and Amy were never sued by past employees — they were there for so short of a time that they figured it was easier to just move on and write the abuse and stolen money off.
A lot of Samy's obsessive behaviours, like not letting anyone but him use the till and stealing waitresses tips, makes a lot of sense if you interpret Amy's Baking Company as a front for some sort of money laundering operation. Samy's past in organized crime just makes this more likely.
Ramsay infamously has a habit of spitting out food that tastes weird to him. This makes more sense if you know that Bonaparte's is the first ever thing Ramsay ever filmed for TV, and he almost got food poisoning; in that episode he asked for the chef's signature dish and ended up being fed a rancid scallop. Ramsay had to induce vomiting to get it out of his system, since rotten seafood can be lethal. In chronologically later episodes, he mentions being food poisoned many other times during the production of the show. No wonder, by the time of The F Word and his US Kitchen Nightmares series, he's developed a habit of not swallowing anything that doesn't make his taste buds sing.
To this day, even on the current season of Hotel Hell, kitchens are still shown to have rotten foods in their fridges. This means that, despite multiple years of Gordon doing this and exposing such things on national television, US health inspectors are STILL failing to do their jobs and inspect kitchens properly.
Any restaurant that's almost a million dollars in debt will probably not stay open long, no matter how much Gordon turns the business around.
Just the fact some of these restaurants have gotten that far into debt to start with. One would think the owners would've had sense to close down and sell when the business first began to tank.
"Amy's Baking Company":
The turnover at the restaurant, by Samy's own admission, was over 100 staff in a year. That's about an employee EVERY THREE DAYS. Which means even one week without a firing was probably rare.
That's supposing they don't quit first.
The sheer number of unseemly, acrimonious arguments — all just during this episode's filming over two days — makes one wonder how many ugly scenes happened before, and how they may have been even worse.
Amy Bouzaglo could have well been a tragedy just waiting to happen. This woman is obviously not well, and she has shown she sees nothing wrong with physically harming somebody for criticizing her food. It's not a stretch at all that she may have grabbed one of those butcher knives and gone after a patron. Not to mention that nobody can fire her for her erratic behavior — she owns the place.
And then shedid; Samy literally chased down a drunk man with a knife in his hand while Amy was shouting, "Let me!"
The owner of Sam's Mediterranean Kabob Room not only forced all of his children to work at the restaurant without pay, but he'd told them multiple times when they were younger that they would work for him and not have lives of their own. It makes it seem as if he only had children, so he could have free slave labor later in life.
The downplayed version of this is actually Truth in Television — many people (particularly in Asia) have kids mostly "to take care of them when they're older", and the parents get anywhere from confused to angry if they find out the kids don't want to do that, or want to work in a field or marry a partner that the parent didn't pick for them.
Rose, the owner of Leone's, is seen pressing on her throat when she speaks and has a very raspy voice. Looking closer, she had a tracheostomy collar installed due to her health issues. Made worse by her passing only 3 years after the episode was filmed.
did; Samy literally chased down a drunk man with a knife in his hand while Amy was shouting, "Let me!"