User Reviews

As William Dozier used to say on "Batman". Well, now it's here.

In previous seasons there have been revisit episodes where Gordon came back and met with some of the most stubborn and rude owners and the majority of the time he found out they had mellowed (to various degrees) and taken his help to heart. Yes, even ones that argued with customers.

You see, with time comes reflection, where a person can look back and learn from their mistakes; situations and tempers cool off and a real honest assessments can be made of things. Unsurprisingly, this was not the case for Amy and Gangstahusband. At all. They doubled down and continued to blame everybody but themselves. You'd think she was inhaling lines of catnip all day long. Holy moly.

Once again, she blamed everybody else but herself. She tried to deflect and blame tourists, "crazies" (I guess that's the revamped name for "haters"), and camera crews. Of course the reality is none of is true. Like other owners in previous episodes, she seems to think the world began yesterday and that there is no passed human experience. We needn't look any further than passed episodes of the series: despite the wild owners, restaurants that remained open, saw increases in their business (I remember once saying by 30%); "crazies" and "haters" didn't stop the businesses from bringing in money. No amount of tourists stopped them from filling seats; can't blame tourists and camera crews, regardless of what you think they are doing. OMG, stop the presses -- online restaurant reviewers actually eat at restaurants -- go figure! No, can't blame them either; every restaurant, good or bad, gets reviewed. At the end of the day when she falls asleep with Gangstahusband (or maybe that's separate beds), the problems are the same as before, during, and after Ramsay: empty seats. And why are these seats empty? First place: her. Second place is tied: Gangstahusband and her food. Like every single restaurant on "Kitchen Nightmares" before Amy's Baking Company, every single empty seat you see if a customer who didn't like the food. Like Chappy (from the episode "Chappy's") you can say your food is good and in vein point to the few customers who are there to eat it, but in reality the Amy's business should be so busy the seats are rarely empty regardless of the time of day. Try going to a Taco Bell is a tourist area during business hours; it's full, isn't it? The drive through has multiple cars in it, doesn't it? Yes.

You thought it was bad when the co-owner of Park's Edge said the community wasn't coming because they didn't like the fact that it's minority owned? Well, Amy took that alienation to a whole new level and attacked people online, deflecting, making excuses, claiming people were doing things they were not, and coughing up fur balls all over the internet community. In Sanityville, Amy's Baking Company should be so busy that she doesn't have time to go online and make all those angry and vile replies.

So, let's look at reality: Chef Gordon Ramsay has twenty-four restaurants currently open and a net worth reported by Forbes at a billion dollars. Yet there Amy and Gangstahusband are, struggling to keep ONE restaurant open. To paraphrase a quote from the film "The Lost Boys": "Tell me Amy, how could a billion dollars be wrong?" Eventually, when the dust settles and tourists die out with only the occasional visit, she'll goes from blaming the tourists (the "crazies"), back to blaming the locals (the "haters"). After all, it's always somebody else's fault in the land of Amytopia. And the "haters" won't come forever, eventually this place will go the way of Burger Kitchen. And it'll be just the two of them running the whole place; who in that town would even fill out an application?

Remember when she said God brought her and Gangstahusband together? Well, God is trying to tell her something else: humble yourself. Get down on your knees. Pray. Beg for forgiveness. Make amends. God is not telling her to double down, attack people online, blame others, flip people off, curse at customers and staff. No, no, no. If she hears that, that's Satan talking to her. Apparently Amy needs to be so humbled that she has to walk in the desert for forty years. Even then she'll just blame God and say that he's a "hater".

Right, I do admit that I enjoyed the Kitchen Nightmares episode "Amy's Baking Company" to an extent – to the extent of watching a freak-show at a traveling carnival or perhaps a particularly vile episode of the Jerry Springer Show. At the same time I felt embarrassed to chuckle at those obviously mentally deranged, delusional couple, same as I would be embarrassed at laughing somebody who stutters. In addition, not having seen very many episodes of Ramsays US-version of Kitchen Nightmares, I found it slightly distressing that the former master-cook had stooped down to such a low-level, and hence considered the "ABC"-episode the low point of the entire franchise. I realized that I was wrong when I watched "Return to Amy's Baking Company".

Like I mentioned in my other review, it should be clear even to a psychology-student in his second semester that Amy is a severely disturbed person, suffering from a histrionic personality-disorder and possibly schizophrenia and psychotic paranoia. We could now argue to what extent it is okay to make fun of sick or disabled people. Laugh at a deaf and dumb soprano-singer? Possible, if he's doing all he can to get his face into pay-TV. However, in Amy's case, the woman is so far gone, that she doesn't even realize her own level of craziness. Some would have called her husband, Sammy, thus an enabler, but knowing what it's like to live with a mentally ill spouse from firsthand experience, I'd simply say that he's living in denial. However, this doesn't excuse him being a foul, obnoxious restaurateur, free of all manners, who seems to live in the illusion that he's some sort of mobster.

But that's not the reason why I consider this episode here the worst of the lot. The reason for having it produced in the first place completely escapes me. Sure, I understand: the ratings. People love a freak-show and Reality-TV is the closest thing we have to the sideshows, elephant men and bearded ladies these days. Still, it is saddening to see a chef like Gordon Ramsay stoop down to those levels. It is (to my knowledge) the only episodes, where he merely narrates from within a studio, looking at all times as if he wanted to sell off a set of steak-knifes at half price. The rest of the show is cut together from the former episodes, snippets from internet- and YouTube-memes (it is likely you've seen most of those soon after having seen the first episodes) and a revisit (not by Ramsay himself, of course) to Amy's den of distaste. Those are perhaps the most distasteful parts (no, by now the show has long passed the point of dealing with food), showing the obnoxious couple at their greediest, apparently living according to the philosophies "there is no such thing as bad publicity" and "who cares where the cash is coming from". Again, we all understand that making money in a business is vital, but again, there's the difference between the European edition of Kitchen Nightmares (how to fix a failing restaurant into a top-notch establishment) and the US-version (how to profit; devil may care about good food).

In the end, there are only winners in this episode: Gordon (surely) got his ratings; Amy and Sammy got free PR (and might as well drop all pretense of cooking, turning the place into a sort of cabaret), 99 percent of the audience got their freak-show, the TV-executives are happy – well perhaps there is one exception: The viewer, who had come to see a show about restaurants and cooking may be the only looser here.

4/10 I gave for the prior episode; here I'll reduce it to a 2/10 and would avoid both "Amy's Baking Company" and further episodes of KN-US even if they'd pay me.