This Was The Biggest Scandal In Kitchen Nightmares History
You could be an ardent "Kitchen Nightmares" fan, having watched Gordon Ramsay scream at struggling restaurants in both the show's British and American versions. Or, maybe you've only watched the few montage clips of the worst "Kitchen Nightmares" meltdowns on YouTube. Regardless of the case, chances are you know about Amy and Samy Bouzaglo. Everyone knows about the Season 6 husband-wife duo behind the Arizona-based Amy's Baking Company simply because it was the biggest scandal that the show has ever seen!
Samy managed the front of the house, while Amy ran the kitchen, but after they amassed a string of bad reviews thanks to their horrendous behavior toward customers, the two finally sought Ramsay's help to turn the biz around, according to Reality TV Revisited. What followed was an exposé of the owners taking their staff's tips, firing employees, stubbornly defending bad food, verbally abusing customers, and meltdowns of epic proportions until Ramsay decided the restaurant could not be helped. That's right: Amy's Baking Company was one of the only failing restaurants that Ramsay walked away from.
Unsurprisingly, the restaurant got a tremendous amount of bad PR after the show aired, with the duo finally selling their establishment in 2015, per the New York Post. But alas, that's not the last scandalous piece of news that the world would hear about Amy and Samy.
Amy's Baking Company's owners have both had run-ins with the law
According to USA Today, both the Bouzaglos had run-ins with the law prior to appearing on "Kitchen Nightmares" and before they got married in 2004. In fact, Screen Rant claims that 9-1-1 was called even whilst the show was being filmed due to an altercation between Samy and a man who wrongly thought that the argument was being put on purposefully for the show.
Amy, it turns out, had four cases filed against her between 1998 and 2000 for various amounts of unpaid debt amounting to a total of $14,000. She even served one year in federal prison after pleading guilty in a separate case related to misusing a Social Security number when she was trying to secure a bank loan of $15,000 in 2013.
While Samy had no criminal record in the U.S., he, too, served time in prison before he immigrated to America from Israel. New York Post reports that he had prior drug and extortion charges filed against him and had documents banning him from France and Germany. Although the couple had been fighting an immigration case against Samy since 2008, he was eventually deported a few years after the show aired. The couple moved to Israel in 2018 where Amy now shows off her bakes on Instagram and earns commissions through a shop on Amazon.