Amy and Samy
Amy’s Baking Company
Kitchen nightmares
I’ve only just discovered this couple, after watching their episode of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, on Youtube. On watching the opening, I assumed that it was going to be another episode in which the owners made various mistakes, and were resistant but ultimately accepted that Ramsay was trying to help, and started on their road to recovery. Obviously there were a lot more anger and emotional issues that often don’t exist in the people who take part in Kitchen Nightmares, given that the footage of the night before Ramsay arrived showed Samy and Amy verbally abusing a customer because he was tired of waiting for a single pizza, and demanding that he pay despite not receiving his food, and even threatening to call the police on him.
However when Ramsay arrived, they seemed to be a pleasant if very eccentric couple, and she clearly was very talkative, unable to stop once she started, and divulging things that weren’t really connected with the subject at hand. She embarked on a discussion about online haters, and described people in the local area as being lazy, the reason behind a high staff turnover. It didn’t take very long before the restaurant’s real problems started to emerge, when the young server, a girl named Miranda, who seemed perfectly pleasant, told Ramsay that she never received any tips, that customers might leave her.
Samy justified it, by saying that he had had to cover three orders since Ramsay had been there, so if the wait staff could take all the customer’s orders then they could keep their tips.
Another issue became evident, when Ramsay observed Miranda telling him a order, but not entering it into the POS system herself, even though as she told Ramsay, she had used them numerous times before. Samy claimed that she needed training, something that wasn’t true, and possibly would have come up, if not at Miranda’s interview for the job, or mentioned on her CV, then in the month and a half that she had been working for him and his wife at the time of airing.
The wait times were clearly another issue, as Ramsay received a undercooked pizza, and then had to wait apparently over a hour for the next item he had ordered. I did like the fact that Miranda received a tip directly from Ramsay, showing once again that he’s a fair man.
Ramsay told Samy that his pizza was undercooked, and expected him to tell his wife, but apparently Amy was too fragile to be able to deal with negative feedback. When Ramsay did eventually manage to tell her what he actually thought about the food, he was dismissed, and Amy responded by saying something like, her food was loved by ‘real customers, not haters’.
Samy’s temper was clearly revealed, when Ramsay told the customers about the unusual practice of keeping wait staff’s tips for himself. The customers present reacted in the same way that I had expected them to, and it spurred Samy to react rather aggressively, facing Ramsay head on.
Amy’s fragile state was revealed once again, in her reaction to her young food runner Katie, asking her if she was sure about a plate, after Amy had told her two different table numbers. She sacked the young girl, chastising her for crying at the prospect of losing her job. Amy seemed to be adamant that Katie had delivered the question in a aggressive manner, referring to Katie as being a ‘poisonous little viper’. However she seemed to be a perfectly pleasant and well adjusted young girl, in the brief glimpses of her in the episode, and I felt genuinely sorry for her, losing her job in such a manner.
Another unusual business practice was revealed the next morning, as the restaurant was closed, due to Samy and Amy not being on the premises. However it gave Ramsay opportunity to speak with some of their previous employees, Jessica and Henry. Henry was a bus boy, and told Ramsay that he had been made to wash Samy’s car, while working for them. Jessica on the other hand, revealed that in eighteen months, she had seen fifty people come and go.
I have to say, that these two are quite possibly the worst employers I’ve ever encountered, even leaving aside the TMZ clip, and the facebook posts that they allegedly made. I don’t like to call people crazy, but they come very close to deserving the label. Amy seems to flip flop emotionally more than her husband, but his anger issues obviously equal hers. It’s Katie and Miranda that had the clearest heads in that company, as Katie said in the opening segment that Ramsay would be wasting his time, and Miranda seemed to understand better how to run the front of house than Samy did.
I think the core of Amy and Samy’s problem might have been emotional immaturity, well among other things. Anyway it was a fascinating episode to watch, and I will be drawing on some of the traits displayed, and the events broadcast at some point in the future I’m sure.
Amy’s Baking Company original Episode uploaded by Kitchen Nightmares
Amy’s Baking Company revisited episode uploaded by Tenten Uchiha
Musings of a thirtysomething woman 