GORDON Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares viral star Amy Bouzaglo looks unrecognisable now after being the only restaurant owner that the chef gave up on.
Amy and her husband Samy, the fiery owners of Amy’s Baking Company in Scottsdale, Arizona, instantly became notorious after featuring on the British chef’s show in 2013.
Things quickly got out of hand during the episode, with the couple engaging in a number of heated exchanges with Ramsay about the shoddy quality of the restaurant.
The restaurant owners were filmed swearing and physically threatening diners in a number of bizarre interactions.
They would chase unhappy diners out onto the street, yelling: “Fk you! You piece of st!”
One one occasion, a physical altercation between Amy’s husband and a customer got so out of hand that one of the show’s producers had to jump in.
The couple famously blamed everyone for their troubles, including “haters” and “bloggers,” but not themselves.
They would also take their waitresses’ tips much to the fury of Gordon.
And one of the most infamous moments in show saw Samy and Amy force a customer out of the restaurant saying “f*** you” and calling him a “weeny”.
She ranted: “I make excellent food, you motherf***ers you all think you can come in here and say these things”.
Even hard-nosed Ramsay couldn’t handle the heat and, for the first time ever in the show’s history, quit working with the owners and walked away.
The exasperated chef said: “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.”
He added: “After about 100 Kitchen Nightmares, I met two owners I could not help, it is because they are incapable of listening.”
Amy now looks unrecognisable nine years on from the disastrous episode.
She continues to describe herself as a “baking wizard” despite being ridiculed by Ramsay and shutting down Amy’s Baking Company in 2015.
Amy appears to still be cooking, posting clips of her cakes and pastries on her TikTok account, and she has nearly 30,000 fans following her recipes on Instagram.
Her bio states: “Make cake, not war.”
Samy had invested more than $1million to build Amy’s Baking Company in 2006 to fulfill Amy’s dreams
About two years prior to the episode’s filming, bloggers started leaving negative reviews of the restaurant’s food and the owners’ violent behaviour.
From Ramsay’s time at the restaurant, it appeared a dinner service full of yelling and swearing, food getting send back and a waiter getting fired was a standard night at the eatery.
Amy had slammed the reviews as “lies”, but during the episode, even Samy admitted his wife doesn’t cope well with criticism.
After the show aired and the full extent of the chaos was revealed, the restaurant in Scottsdale became an instant tourist attraction.
But the couple also received a huge amount negative feedback on their Facebook page.
When Amy and Samy responded by calling out the people who posted negative comments, they provoked more of the same – not only on Facebook, but also on Yelp and Reddit.
One Yelp reviewer said they had to stick around for an hour to receive their order and were threatened by the owners when they complained about the service.
Forbes later used the reactions as a poster example of how a business should not react to comments on social media.
Reflecting her experiences, she told the NYPost: “I literally just wanted to die.”
“I was completely shocked and mortified. They portrayed us as being defensive, combative.
“They made it seem like I couldn’t take any kind of criticism. Like Samy didn’t know what he was doing in the front.”
Her husband Samy said: “They wanted to do this for drama.”
