Recap / Kitchen Nightmares S6 E15 "Amy's Baking Company"

The moment when Gordon finally realizes that Samy and Amy are beyond hope.

"I think Chef Ramsay is gonna be wasting his time. You can't change Samy and Amy; they're... a lost cause."

— Katy Cipriano, who was (unfortunately) 100% correct

"Amy's Baking Company" is the fifteenth and last episode of Season 6 (and 82nd overall) of the US version of Kitchen Nightmares, set at the titular Amy's Baking Company in Scottsdale, Arizona. It is freely available on YouTube in its entirety by the series' official channel (albeit age-restricted).

After its airing in 2013, it quickly became the most notorious episode of the show, and for a very good reason: Gordon Ramsay has dealt with incapable, delusional, and stubborn restaurant owners before, but as we discover, Amanda "Amy" and Salomon "Samy" Bouzaglo may be the most unhinged owners he's ever had to deal with.^note Technically, Samy is the actual owner while Amy is the head chef, but they're still considered to hold an equal position of authority within the restaurant.

Things are already messy even before Gordon arrives. Amy says she brought him in so he could pretty much be their proverbial Yes-Man and tell off all the "internet bullies" who have left negative reviews of the restaurant on websites like Yelp. Said "bullies" have noted the poor quality of the food and customer service; Amy and Samy constantly lash out at customers, dish out threats (Amy even makes a meal spicier to deliberately hurt a customer), and Can't Take Criticism — not even the littlest. Employees are also treated poorly: Samy is the only one who can input orders, pour wine, and handle money, and none of the other workers are allowed to do any of that, even if they're familiar with the system. While the camera crew are setting up, we see the incredibly long waiting times to have food served aren't worth it; customers are dissatisfied with the quality of the food and service. Two customers waiting an hour for a pizza are unintentionally swung into an argument with Samy when one of them fiercely lashes out at him. When he and his friend leave (after Samy repeatedly curses at him and tells him to leave), it escalates so much into a near-fistfight that the cameramen have to come in and break it up. Amy storms back into the kitchen after berating all the customers in the restaurant.

When Gordon arrives, he's initially smitten with the restaurant's presentation, organization, and hygiene, although he has second thoughts when Amy notes she closes the restaurant whenever Samy leaves, and that she can't find any quality workers. Looks are deceiving, however: when Gordon meets a waitress named Miranda Winant, he quickly learns that she only works on an hourly wage, and neither she nor the other servers get tips; they're taken by Samy, which is illegal. Samy says this is okay because he does much of the front-of-house work. While sampling dishes, Gordon likes the dessert but has a negative reaction towards many foods that are confusingly made/flavored, undercooked, raw, or overly greasy. Gordon learns the oddly sweet/spicy red pepper ravioli he was given was made with pre-bought canned ravioli despite being advertised as freshly-made.

During dinner service, Gordon criticizes the duo for the food he was served, and discovers Samy sugarcoats to his wife what goes on in the restaurant and refuses to tell her about the problems with the food most of the time. Amy lashes out at Gordon for noting the ravioli was made with pre-made ingredients. We also watch as many dissatisfied customers send back their food, which wasn't worth the ridiculously long wait. Amy accidentally gives the wrong table order to Miranda, and Gordon witnesses Samy's tip-taking firsthand; telling this to the whole restaurant winds up getting him into a heated argument with Samy. When Amy gives Katy Cipriano, another waitress, some instructions but hastily corrects herself, Katy asking Amy "Are you sure?" gets her fired from the restaurant.

The next day, Gordon is unable to talk to the two due to the restaurant being closed. He uses the time to talk to two former workers, Jessica and Henry, who explain to him the restaurant has gone through at least 50 staff members due to Amy and Samy's behavior, and that they frequently upset their local community. Eventually, he is able to talk to them, but when Amy shows off yet again that she can't take the slightest bit of criticism and responds to any complaints about her restaurant with loud arguing (and Samy revealing that the turnover rate was at a staggering 100), Gordon — for the first and only time in the UK or US series — throws in the towel and leaves. Before he does, he gives the two a particularly epic — and uncharacteristically calm — "The Reason You Suck" Speech about how he can't work with restaurant owners who are this unprofessional.

To say the least, the amount of egotism and incompetence shown by Amy and Samy led to the episode and the restaurant itself attaining a near-memetic status. Things got even more crazy when, after people rightfully called out the restaurant on their Facebook page, Amy and Samy responded by sending out threats, then creating a second Facebook page in an attempt to fend them off. Naturally, this only prompted more negative attention; people began going to the restaurant to see if it was as bad as it was shown here, and it was.

A year after the episode premiered, a special episode called "Return to Amy's Baking Company" was aired, which showed deleted footage from the original episode as well as a newer interview with Amy and Samy.

Amy and Samy also showed up on an episode of Dr. Phil, where it was even more apparent that they were clearly not right. Judging by the way they acted in the newer interview, things didn't change at all prior to the restaurant finally closing for good on September 1, 2015; Amy claimed that it was due to issues with the building's landlord at the time, not because of the controversy that spawned from their appearance in this show.

Wikipedia has an article for this episode, the only episode of the entire series to have one on there. According to the last sentence of that article, "the building that hosted Amy's Baking Company hosted another restaurant called 'B&R Restaurant' for a while before also closing, and is now host to an Aikido school."

---

This episode provides examples of:

• Almighty Janitor: Employees who have gone to culinary school or have extensive experience in restaurants are assigned menial tasks by Amy and Samy, neither of whom are experienced in comparison.
  • Miranda is experienced in the restaurant business and could handle using the point-of-sale system well, but she's not allowed to do either thing, and was initially only tasked with pouring water.
  • The employee whose sole responsibility is making salads, Christine, actually has education for a sous-chef position, which means she ought to be responsible for inventory, cleanliness, organization, and training of staff.
  • Henry, one of the restaurant's many ex-employees at the time of the episode, deserves a special mention for being assigned by Samy to wash his car during one work day rather than actually getting involved in the restaurant's service.
• Animated Adaptation: An animated parody of the episode was made as one of many products from its infamous reception, and a clip of it was later featured in the return episode. You can watch it here.
• Appeal to Worse Problems: When customers complain about their food the day before Gordon arrives, Amy retorts that "The food we're making is going straight into the trash, and there are starving people who could be eating it, but instead these people decide they're going to come fuck with my life."
• Arc Words: The terms "haters", "internet bullies", "trolls" and "Yelpers" are used a lot by the restaurant's owners to mean "critics", which goes to show how unprofessional they are concerning their flaws and issues.^note Outside of the episode, they've also used "Redditors" and "hackers" regularly.
• Bad Boss: Amy and Samy take this up to eleven, having run through over 100 employees in the course of a year! Their staff appears to be no more than 5 people, so they have already gone through more than 20 times their entire workforce. They don't allow their employees to do any actual cooking jobs, and Samy takes their tip money for himself and Amy, justifying that they don't deserve it because they don't work hard enough. Amy also fires Katy on the spot after the latter simply asks her to confirm which table an order corresponds to. Ramsay resorts to talking to two ex-employees of the restaurant after he learns how often Amy and Samy run through workers, which turned out to be about double the estimate Ramsay initially heard.
• Big, Stupid Doodoo-Head: "You little weenie! Keep walking!"
• Blatant Lies: Oh, good lord, yes.
  • Amy and Samy lied multiple times about having home-cooked food, at one point having bought some cakes from another store.
  • At the beginning of the episode, Amy states that they don't use frozen food. When Ramsay receives his ravioli, Samy tells him it was frozen.
  • At one point, Ramsay gives Amy a detailed explanation of the problems he had with a burger. Later, Amy mocks his criticism, and eventually says that he never offered her constructive criticism.
  • They claimed that they don't take their waitresses' tips, which would be illegal, but the camera crew caught them doing just that on video.
  • Amy outright accuses Ramsay of lying about the termination of 50 employees, but Samy pipes in and tells her that they've fired over 100.
  • Lastly, on the restaurant's two Facebook pages, they claimed the images on the menus and their Facebook posts weren't infringing on anyone's copyrights, but said images can be easily found through a Google image search.
• Body Language: Amy clearly can't hide hers. Ramsay calls her on her shaking her head "no" when he informs them he is here to help them. She also shakes "no" or rolls her eyes every time she's given criticism. She continues it on the last morning when Ramsay comes in, being unable to hide her fury at even seeing him.
• Body Motifs: Amy's large eyes are given considerable attention during shots (to the point of emphasizing them as creepy), and Ramsay criticizes her for "pulling wool over customers' eyes" over her restaurant's use of fake fresh food.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: The episode is noticeably a lot more open about the show's production techniques that otherwise go unmentioned. It opens with a scene that is from the day before the show was supposed to properly begin filming, where the crew would usually be testing their filming setup and capturing B-roll. At the end of the episode, we get to see the crew tearing down. Amy herself makes it clear she knows she's being televised.
• Broken-System Dogmatist: "Dogmatist" isn't even a word that can cover Amy and Samy's personalities, and "broken" is putting it mildly. They are so disconnected on how to run a restaurant, and wondering why it's failing, that listing every single instance of what they've got wrong would take up most of this page.
• Butt-Monkey: After the episode's airing, the restaurant became so infamous to the point where tons of people confronted Amy and Samy themselves for a good while, and those who had the chance to do it before the restaurant closed either did it in person or through prank calls.
• Can't Take Criticism: Any kind of criticism lobbied at Amy or the business, including constructive criticism, is taken by her as a personal attack. Even simply telling her that she can't take criticism is enough for her to go on a tirade.
• Catchphrase: Amy has three of them:
  • "(Insert food item that Ramsay complains about) I have customers telling me it is the best (insert food) they have ever eaten!"
  • "I've never had a problem with that (insert food)."
  • "They're just not used to eating food that doesn't come from a can."
• Change the Uncomfortable Subject: During Ramsay and the owners' introductions and tour of the restaurant, Amy says that Ramsay needs to clone her and Samy because nobody else can run the restaurant the "right" way. Ramsay is clearly a bit weirded out by this and decides to move the conversation forward by asking them if they have children. Amy responds with "We have three little boys but they're trapped inside cat bodies. Meow!" Ramsay is even more bewildered by this and immediately changes the subject a second time.
• Cloudcuckoolander:
  • Amy drifts into this at times. In the return episode, she bizarrely (and emphatically) acts out the behaviors of lookie-loos in the restaurant.
  • Samy also gets into this. Of particular mention is the scene where this overweight, balding, out-of-shape, nigh-on senior citizen tells Gordon that he's a gangster; the look on Gordon's face makes it clear that he's lost hope for these two. That moment was subverted when it came out that Samy wasn't just trying to sound tough — he actually used to be a gangster, and was facing deportation from the United States for not disclosing this to immigration authorities.
• Control Freak: Amy and Samy openly admit they are this. They insist on doing all of the most important tasks in the restaurant themselves, to the level where Miranda isn't allowed to handle money, pour drinks or even use the POS system to confirm orders despite having plenty of experience with it from previous jobs. In the kitchen, a chef, Christine, is stuck on preparing salads as Amy handles just about everything else.
• Cordon Bleugh Chef: As Gordon points out, the decent-quality ingredients Amy has are ruined by her unconventional recipes and cooking methods, which aren't good at all. While only a few of the recipes are explored, it's apparent that Amy does this for the restaurant's entire menu, as nobody is satisfied with their food during the course of the dinner service. Gordon's mentions include the following:
  • The pizza Amy made for him was rather sweet with an undercooked crust.
  • Her Blue Ribbon Burger is overloaded with random toppings (blue cheese, marinated mushrooms, garlic aioli, white truffle oil and bacon) and flavors, on top of being soaked through with grease.
  • The Red Pepper Ravioli's flavor is a combination of sweet and spicy, which Gordon considers a bad flavor mix for ravioli, on top of also having an odd set of toppings (bacon, sweetcorn and cilantro).
  • Amy's salmon burger is overcooked to the point of being dry and flavorless.
• Crazy Cat Lady: In a side interview, Amy says that she and Samy own three cats, and claims she can speak feline. That claim is almost the least crazy thing one can say about an utter lunatic like her.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Twenty to thirty years prior to the episode, Samy had been banned from France and Germany on charges of drug distribution, threats and extortion.
• Disproportionate Retribution:
  • Amy makes a customer's dish painfully spicy after they complained it wasn't spicy enough.
  • Katy gets fired on the spot for asking Amy a question during dinner service.
• Don't Explain the Joke: Amy and Samy explain to Ramsay that they have "three little boys, but they are trapped in cat bodies." Samy then adds "they're cats", though this comes across more as elaborating on his wife's... "eccentricities".
• Don't Like, Don't Eat: Amy and Samy enforce this trope full stop against any customer that dares to have even the slightest criticism about the food, going to extremes to retaliate against such customers. Naturally, the customers gladly take the advice and leave.
• Doublethink: Amy tries to invoke this by saying that the bun of Ramsay's burger was "dry and soggy", asking which one it was. However, she forgets that Ramsay ordered two burgers to sample, one of which was dry and the other was soggy.
• Downer Ending: For the first (and only) time, Ramsay throws in the towel and leaves the owners of Amy's Baking Company to their own devices.
• Epic Fail: The only episode where Gordon simply gives up before he even starts, as the owners are so psychotic and thick-skulled that nothing he can say or do will get through to them.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Aside from a chipper and optimistic opening, this episode devolves into a true "Kitchen Nightmare" more than any other episode. It's an unrelentingly miserable and wretched experience for everyone involved — Ramsay, the owners, the servers, and even the customers.
• Flat "What": How Gordon initially reacts upon learning that Samy regularly pockets the tips meant for waiting staff.
• Flat "Yes": After one of her servers asks a simple question that Amy reacts poorly to (read: asking if Amy was sure about which table was being sent an order), Amy asks Ramsay if he'd let his server talk to him like hers did to her. Ramsay just flatly tells her "Yeah." Later, in the return episode, she believes this response makes Ramsay a pansy.
• Foreshadowing: Everything Katy states at the beginning comes true; from stating how Amy is "sometimes a sweet woman but becomes completely erratic", the fact that Samy and Amy refuse to listen to criticism, and her retort that Ramsay would be wasting his time with them as they won't change.
• French Cuisine Is Haughty: Invoked by Amy. She uses a French accent when mocking Gordon's criticism of her using unfitting ingredient combinations, never mind that Gordon is British.
• Fun with Acronyms: Amy's Baking Company.
• Genre Blindness: Amy and Samy called Gordon for help not because they wanted to improve their restaurant, but because they thought he'd be a Yes-Man who'd give their food his seal of approval and silence the "internet bullies", who under their terminology are basically everyone who's ever given them a bad review or the slightest amount of criticism. Let that sink in for a moment: they thought the infamously foul-mouthed, brutally honest Gordon Ramsay would be completely loyal to their views. Genre Blindness doesn't begin to describe their blindness!
• Henpecked Husband: Samy shows shades of this between the two episodes. Amy is always the one to insist that they're a team, Samy is often seen keeping very quiet when she really gets going with her tirades, she's quick to blame him for the problems with the restaurant in their submission video, and most tellingly, bonus footage shows Samy practically begging Gordon to make her change her ways and take criticism to heart. His extreme violence when dealing with customers could be caused, in part, by frustration with his wife that's been boiling over.
• High Turnover Rate: Amy's Baking Company went through more than 100 employees in just one year. Rough napkin maths means that each employee lasted 3-7 days at best at the restaraunt.
• Hope Spot: During Ramsay's initial inspection, the restaurant is perfectly clean, the kitchen is in good shape, the pantry is immaculate and meticulously organized, the food stocks are within their dates and labeled. It's a far better start than over 90% of all other restaurants on the show make with their first impression. It's a testament to how Amy and Samy could theoretically run a successful restaurant, as they have all the materials to do so already there, but it's their own insanely violent and egotistical personalities that drive away employees and customers that are the sticking point.
• Ignorant of Their Own Ignorance: Amy and Samy don't seem to understand the reason the business is doing bad is because of them.
• Ignored Expert: Ramsay is pretty much reduced to this during the dinner service. Amy not only directly, and repeatedly, tells him that she's not listening to him, she tells her staff to also ignore him. At a loss, Ramsay goes up to the front to try to help Samy, but he also isn't receptive to any advice Ramsay offers.
• Incompetence, Inc.: Amy's Baking Company is run by a pair of certifiable lunatics who steal tips from their staff, openly scream at their customers and are in denial over their horrible food. No wonder this is the one restaurant so bad that Gordon just gives up and walks out on the owners.
• Insane Troll Logic: Amy frequently indugles herself with this mindset:
  • She tells Gordon that her staff don't deserve tips because she doesn't believe that they work just as hard as Samy does... all while giving said staff minimal work, prohibiting the more qualified employees from even using the till as part of their job and leaving Samy to mainly work on his own outside the kitchen.
  • She insists on cooking food for one customer at a time, which is the reason many of her customers are left waiting for more than an hour of service. What happens when they complain that they've been waiting for so long without food? Amy assumes that "they're full of shit" and are really just there to stir up trouble.
  • She tells Katy that "she can go, for sure" upon firing at the end of a dining service (for simply asking Amy "are you sure?"), prompting Katy to do as she says and leave. Amy somehow interprets this as Katy deliberately ignoring her, demanding Katy to come back so she can admonish her for "walking away from her", while also reminding her that she's still fired. Katy bursts into tears in response, which makes Amy even more angry at her.
• The Inspector Is Coming: One of the few positive things Gordon states about the restaurant is how clean and well-organized it is. Even though it has since been confirmed that Amy and Samy cleaned the place up for Gordon's arrival, that's something one actually has to hand to them, as it's something that very few other restaurants in the show have even tried to do before Gordon came.
• Instantly Proven Wrong: When Ramsay tells Amy and Samy that he learned that they've fired more than 50 employees in a single year, Amy calls him a liar and demands proof until Samy interjects, admitting that it's actually over 100. This causes Amy to get upset and storm off.
• Insult Misfire: Amy thanks Gordon profusely after he tells her that "there's something not quite right here" with her and Samy's claims that they have the best food and service, as though she feels vindicated in her belief that she's being unfairly antagonized by everyone. By this point in the episode, however, Amy and Samy had already disclosed to Gordon that they have a vindictive view of their customers and employees, along with several other red flags related to their management of the restaurant. Being as self-centered as she is, Amy was unable to see that Gordon's comment was referring to them.
• It's Personal: To Amy and a lesser extent Samy, there's no negative feedback that isn't a personal insult.
• Jaw Drop: Gordon's reaction when his message to Amy doesn't end up in the way he'd expect.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Played with. Few people would disagree with Amy's "the customer is not always right" line, but when the context is taken into consideration, it's clearly just another manifestation of her inability to take criticism. Ramsay later interviews one of her former employees, who points out that Amy's motto is closer to "the customer is never right".
• Kick the Dog:
  • Plenty of them on Amy's part:
    • She deliberately over-spices one customer's meal in the hopes that he would get hurt, as she proudly states. Worth mentioning is that in Arizona, Tampering with Food and Drink in an attempt to cause physical harm is considered a felony that can get you twenty years in prison. Great job admitting to this on camera, Amy!
    • After firing Katy for asking a question, Amy tells her again after working hours that she can go. The girl then tries to leave, and Amy demands her to come back. The reason? To tell her off for walking away and that she's still fired. A bonus point is that Amy picked up the habit of following Katy's name with 'little' to demean her ever since.
    • She constantly talks back at Gordon when he made it clear that he wanted to help her and Samy with their business. After the restaurant's first episode, she made a False Rape Accusation towards him with Samy and continued to speak ill of him in the return episode.
  • Samy is not without his own acts, either:
    • There was a pair of customers at the beginning who, after waiting over an hour for a single pizza, decided to leave rather than wait any further. As the two were on their way out the door, Samy demands that they pay for the pizza they never got. Not only that, he and Amy hurl abuse towards him and tell him to leave, simply because he dared to tell them that he's still waiting for his order. Samy only stops when Amy threatens to call the police, which Samy turns to discourage her from.
    • Not to mention Samy admitted to stealing the servers' tips for himself and Amy.
• Know-Nothing Know-It-All: Amy and Samy manage to top the most notorious owners from past episodes (including Sebastian of "Sebastian's", Alan of "Burger Kitchen", and Joe of "Mill Street Bistro"), chewing out customers who complain about underdone or inedible dishes and even going as far as to state they don't know what good food tastes like. Samy even admits that he has no experience in running a restaurant; the two assigned menial jobs to people who went to culinary school (such as setting tables and pouring water), not to mention that Samy had one employee (Henry) wash his car during service. They try to justify this by claiming "[the employees] don't know anything."
• Know When to Fold 'Em: When Gordon attempts to present his plan to fix the restaurant, Amy and Samy shout him down and insult him (e.g., saying he doesn't know what he's talking about). For this reason, and all the other problems they demonstrated over the course of the episode, Gordon decides to just throw in the towel and walk away, knowing that he can't help the owners.
• Lack of Empathy: Amy doesn't understand why Katy is crying literally right after Amy fired her for no real reason. She actually gets angrier, as if this is inappropriate behavior.
• Lethal Chef: At one point, Amy is seen saying she just made a customer's dish so spicy, that it will hurt them to eat it (as a response to said costumer complaining about the dish not being spicy enough).
• A Lighter Shade of Black: In addition to going along with much of Amy's tendencies (especially regarding criticism), Samy gets violent with unsatisfied costumers and takes his waitresses' tips, but he at least has a measure of perspective and is nothing compared to Amy, who's straight-up just a horrible human being.
• Malicious Misnaming: She never says it in the two episodes themselves, but in Amy's Facebook posts, she tended to refer to Reddit and its users (Redditors) who criticized her as "Red-shit" and "Red-shittors".
• Manipulative Editing:
  • Previews for "Return to Amy's Baking Company" feature a little of this. When Kitchen Nightmares returns to Amy's Baking Company after a year of the media circus surrounding them, we're shown footage of Amy disbelievingly exclaiming "Are we being punked?", as if she's hostile toward their intrusion. In context, she's talking about customers' reaction to visiting her restaurant after seeing her antics on the show.
  • The return episode shows the entire footage of Amy talking about her cats, including her mimicking one of her cats (Leo) who has a tendency to meow as if he's singing. However, in the original episode, this mimic ("Meow meow meow!") is spliced out of the appropriate context, making it appear as if Amy is demonstrating her ability to (literally) "speak feline", making her look nutty. Which she clearly is, but still...
  • In their appearance on Dr. Phil, Amy and Samy complained that the show did a lot of deceptive editing to make them look worse. While their public Freak Outs in the episode are clearly not staged, astute viewers may still notice a slight amount of reality TV tricks like conversation jumps and cuts.
• May–December Romance: Samy is over 20 years older than Amy and has a head of white hair. They do appear to have a lot in common, though.
• Misplaced Retribution: Two customers got fed up and left after waiting an unreasonable amount of time for a single pizza. The customer who Samy had to be restrained from hitting was the one who didn't yell at him.
• Mistaken for Spies: Amy and Samy seem to think anyone who dislikes their restaurant or food is a "Yelper" or "internet bully" making up lies about them to destroy their business, unaware that A) Yelp doesn't send out professional reviewers and B) most people had a lot of legitimate complaints about the food and service.
• Motor Mouth: Amy tends to speak very quickly whenever she's feeling threatened. It's impossible to get a word in edgewise once she really gets going.
• My Nayme Is: The husband's name (or nickname, to say the least) is pronounced "Sammy" but spelled "Samy".
• Never My Fault: Amy and Samy are completely incapable of acknowledging their mistakes, blaming all of the restaurant's failings on "inept" staff or "troublesome" customers.
• Nice to the Waiter: Ramsay is duly appalled when he learns that Samy takes all of the tips given to the waiters/waitresses and when Amy fires a waitress for asking a simple question. He makes sure to tip the waitress directly and tries to stand up for them by telling the customers about their tips being stolen and how they deserve those tips.
  Gordon: (slips a $20 bill into the waitress' shirt pocket) This is for you. And only for you. You deserve it.
  • For context, Samy tries to justify this practice by saying that all the wait staff get a regular hourly wage, as opposed to the "minimum wage plus tips" system that is normally standard across the restaurant industry in the United States. Paying a regular, above-minimum wage is perfectly fine and would even be laudable, but stealing tips is highly illegal, as it's the equivalent of wage theft. Tips are considered a gratuity, something paid to a specific person as thanks for providing superior service, and are not considered income for the establishment. As Gordon demonstrates, a majority of the customers who had been tipping are mortified when they find out that the owners are pocketing the money instead of the wait staff who they had intended the tips to go to.
    Gordon: Sir, the tip that you left to the young lady server? The owner takes the tips!
    Customer: That's horrible.
• Not Hyperbole: When Ramsay confronts Samy over stealing the servers' tips, Samy threatens Ramsay by saying that he, not Ramsay, is "the gangster". He wasn't lying at all — Samy was facing deportation because he didn't tell the US immigration authorities that he was banned from Germany and France over drugs and extortion. He's literally a gangster, or at least a (mostly) Reformed Criminal.
• Once an Episode: Averted. Ramsay couldn't get beyond Step 2 because the owners were that ignorant and oblivious to the complaints, and lashed out against anyone that criticized them; as in, they obviously hated criticism, not knowing (or caring) that all of it was very well-deserved. Furthermore, they intended to hire Ramsay as a Yes-Man to defend their restaurant's reputation against "Internet bullies" (i.e., those who criticize their place on Facebook and on Yelp).^note To drive this point further, about 95% of the reviewers on Yelp gave it less than two stars, and many of the 4- and 5-star reviews are sarcastic. The extremely toxic attitude of the owners got Ramsay to give up on them, leaving the episode on a Downer Ending.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: Samy's name is actually a shorthand for "Salomon", but you wouldn't know that from watching the two episodes themselves, as it's only been mentioned in external sources.
• Pet the Dog: For what it's worth, Samy tried to defuse the situation around Amy firing Katy.
• Psychopathic Manchild: Amy and Samy, but especially Amy, who's constantly ready to insist that she's the greatest chef ever to exist on God's green Earth, any and all failings are the result of cheaters and liars out to get her personally, and devolves into screaming fits of rage at anybody who crosses her in the slightest way.
• Rage Breaking Point: Ramsay is extremely patient with Amy and Samy through most of the episode. He acts more surprised and nonplussed than angry over their stupid and wasteful practices. However, once Samy starts to try and get tough with him, Ramsay starts to get just as nasty back.
• Read the Fine Print: Before Gordon arrived, Amy or Samy saw that there are such things as contracts that prevent employees from hopping from one company to another with trade secrets/knowledge (usually used by tech firms like IBM, Compaq, etc.) and figured they could just apply it to food service, for a full year, regardless of reason for termination.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Ramsay gives a brilliant one at the very end of the episode.
  Gordon: I can't help people that can't help themselves and cannot ever take one ounce of criticism. If you're not willing to change, I'm not going to butt heads, argue, scream, whatever you want to say; but this is not normal. And it's not normal for a restaurant to go through that many staff, it's not normal for a kitchen that small to have 65 items on the menu, and it's not normal for the level of animosity that you've built inside this restaurant and outside. You have the right to run the business the way you want to run your business. I have the right to do the right thing. And the right thing for me is to get out of here. Good luck.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here:
  • Katy quits after Amy yells at her one too many times. In an earlier interview, she said that Ramsay would be wasting his time and that the owners were a lost cause.
  • Indeed, Ramsay felt that he'd be wasting his time trying to help the owners after they pretty much told him to fuck off. The episode ends with him stepping in his car and driving off.
  • Even before Ramsay arrived, a television crew sent to scout the place out and pick up B-reel footage caught two customers attempting to leave after their service took an hour. Emphasis on "attempt": they did leave, but not before falling victim to the owners' tempers. One crew member had to restrain Samy.
• Small Name, Big Ego:
  • Amy says that she's the "greatest chef on God's green Earth", and calls out Gordon for being wrong about everything he says, despite Gordon being a professional chef. It got to the point that she claimed herself to be Wonder Woman in one of her posts on the restaurant's Facebook page.
  • There's also a bonus footage clip in the return episode where she tells Gordon that the reason Samy is the only man among the restaurant's staff is because, according to her, male chefs have incredibly large egos.
• Sock Puppet: When Amy mentions their positive reviews to Ramsay, she inadvertently implies that she and Samy have created sockpuppet accounts to write positive reviews of the restaurant.
• Stepford Smiler: Miranda has a smile on her face when she explains to Gordon what it's like to work at the restaurant, but it's clear that she thinks it's a terrible workplace, given how fake her expression looks.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: Amy specifically mentions to Ramsay the positive reviews the restaurant has gotten "that we didn't write".
• Take This Job and Shove It: Katy's reaction after being fired on the spot for asking Amy a simple question.
• Tampering with Food and Drink: Amy attempts this several times during the episode toward customers she doesn't like.
• Tranquil Fury:
  • Gordon has a couple instances:
    • When Gordon finally has enough, he quietly tells Amy and Samy that he's leaving and walks out. Even when he gives his wrap-up review to the camera, he seems more disappointed than angry.
    • He arguably operates as this throughout the whole episode, with only one true outburst overall — and remember, this is Gordon Ramsay we're talking about. He's just too bewildered by the pair to engage in shouting matches with them.
  • Let's face it, Amy's got a lot of anger constantly, but keeps it low-key to a certain extent. Of course, until someone presses her buttons or even so much as talks to her, then she erupts.
• Very False Advertising: The ravioli on the menu is advertised as fresh-made, but it's actually a store-bought frozen product that's simply heated up in the kitchen.
• Villainous Breakdown: Many of Amy's aggressions towards people who criticize her or the restaurant culminate in her going a tirade, attempting to get out of the situation, or both.
• What the Hell Is That Accent?: Samy is Israeli, but of Moroccan-Jewish descent, and has the very distinctive accent to show for it.
• Yes-Man:
  • What Amy and Samy were hoping Gordon to be. They pretty much bend over backwards to do whatever they can to please him in order for him to give them the positive reputation they want. When Gordon tells them he disliked their food, they treat him like an idiot who doesn't know what he's doing. Clearly they didn’t know who they were dealing with.
  • Samy is this to Amy. Despite the fact that she can't really cook and the business is failing, he can't bring himself to ever criticize Amy or pass along customer complaints, probably because he knows that she Can't Take Criticism— ever. This has only fueled her self-delusions, as she is able to easily claim that no-one has ever complained about the food to her. From a Certain Point of View she may be right, as Samy tends to do his utmost to prevent those comments from reaching her, and Gordon even calls them out on this in the return episode's additional footage.

---

Gordon: Well, it's finally happened. After almost a hundred Kitchen Nightmares, I met two owners who I could not help. And it wasn't because I didn't want to, it was because they are incapable of listening. And in a short period of time, they've managed to piss off the community and go through over a hundred employees in one year. Samy and Amy continue to blame everyone else, yet their biggest problem is themselves. And I know whatever changes I would've made, they were never going to stick with them. And that's why I've decided to do something I've never done before. It's such a shame. (walks to and enters his car, starts the engine, and drives off)

---