One of the most memorable episodes from Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares is Amy’s Baking Company, which yielded now-content creator Amy Bouzaglo, after she closed the business.
Kitchen Nightmares is the Gordon Ramsay-fronted reality show which first premiered in 2007. During its run, the reality show was considered an extension of Ramsay’s already successful Hell’s Kitchen franchise.
However, instead of working with chefs, Ramsay worked with restaurant owners and attempted to help them with improving their failing businesses.
Considering that the show ran for seven seasons until it was cancelled, there are a number of memorable episodes and characters that have graced the show.
However, it can be argued that none are more memorable than the married couple, Amy and Samy Bouzaglo, who ran Amy Baking Company until it closed down.
What was Kitchen Nightmares?
In September 2007, the first episode of Kitchen Nightmares aired. The show was fronted and executively produced by Gordon Ramsay.
By the time of the show’s premiere, Ramsay’s no-nonsense stance and fiery tongue had become notorious as the first show to feature the leading culinary expert was Hell’s Kitchen, which premiered in 2005.
Spawning quite the reputation, Kitchen Nightmares was premised on, “Gordon Ramsay visits struggling restaurants across America and spends one week trying to help them become successful.”
The show’s success hinged on how Ramsay would pin-point the cause of the businesses failure, which more often than not, would result in conflict.
Seeing that these businesses were mostly family businesses, interpersonal relationships of either the staff members or the restaurant owners themselves was the source of the failure, which would trickle down to the service and quality of the overall business.
Kitchen Nightmares: Where is Amy’s Baking Company now?
One of the episodes which highlighted how the interpersonal relationships of the business owners can affect the overall success of a company was Amy’s Baking Company. The episode aired as part of season six and was the sixteenth episode.
To date, the episode on IMDb is the most popular and highly ranked episode of Kitchen Nightmares, with a total score of 9.3 out of 10.
The episode featured married couple Amy and Samy Bouzaglo, who owned a bakery business. The couple had called on Ramsay to endorse the quality of the confectionaries. However, Ramsay felt the contrary.
Along with his belief that the staff lived in fear of Amy, who was enabled by her husband’s defence of her and her baking abilities.
After Ramsay decided to quit helping the couple and believed that the business was doomed, his assumptions were proven right, as the business closed down in 2015.
What are Amy and Samy Bouzaglo doing now?
Following their stint on Hell’s Kitchen, and their subsequent feature on Dr. Phil, he too would give up on helping the couple as they believed that there was nothing wrong with them, continually attributing their problems to their external factors.
This continued after Amy’s Baking Company was sold to new owners in 2015.
In response to the news, at the time that, the couple stated, “Yes! Now we can focus on several other projects!” While Samy has kept a low profile in the years that followed, Amy capitalised on her new-found fame.
She is now a content creator sharing her creations on Instagram and continues to share her homemade baked goods through her Amazon store.
Why was Kitchen Nightmares cancelled?
Kitchen Nightmares was cancelled after seven seasons in 2014. While most shows are cancelled either due to a significant drop in ratings, or a show proves too expensive to make compared to the revenue it yields.
This was not the case with Kitchen Nightmares. Gordon Ramsay is the one who decided to end the show.
At the time he made the decision, Ramsay was at his wits end over the continued critique that the businesses he helped failed again after a few months.
While there were businesses that went on to succeed after his intervention, most of them did fail again. Therefore, the constant critique was the ultimate reason Ramsay ended the show.
Will Kitchen Nightmares return?
In 2021, Ramsay had reflected on his decision to end Kitchen Nightmares. While Ramsay could now concede that his decision to end the show was short-sighted, it seems unlikely that he would reboot the show.
This is as he and his production are working on new shows, the latest to premier being 2022’s new cooking competition reality show, Next Level Chef, which is currently airing its first season.
Final thoughts
Kitchen Nightmares was Gordon Ramsay’s reality show which aimed to help failing restaurants in and around America.
While the show provided ample interpersonal conflict, as most of the restaurants were family-owned, it did not really help most of the businesses in the long run, as the unresolved interpersonal matters would resurface later on.
However, for the most part, Ramsay stuck it out to the end. Until he met Amy and Samy Bouzaglo.
The couple is deemed as one of the most delusional couples on reality television. Ramsay failed to stay long enough to work with the company and called it, when he said the business was doomed as it closed down in 2015.