Okay, I saw this yesterday and it
IS pretty damned funny, especially since it involves something common to just about everyone...a bad restaurant dining experience.
You see, there's this restaurant in Scottsdale, Arizona called "Amy's Baking Company." Amy was some kind of a Las Vegas worker (A showgirl, maybe? Who knows? She's a dumb as a sack of hammers and thinks that she is a genius) who met and married some rich construction contractor (Samy who apparently is a native of Israel) about ten years back. When the economy went south and the bottom fell out of the Vegas construction market, Amy convinced Samy to put up about a million bucks to fund her dream: a classy restaurant where she could indulge in her fantasy of being a high end chef. This sounds pretty good so far.
The problem, as is true with a lot of things, was in the execution of the plan.
These two people are the absolute worst in regards to just about anything to do with a dining experience. About two years ago their behavior finally caught up with them when some guy published an online review of their little eating establishment, totally trashing it. Other online people began to pile on and before long Amy and Samy found themselves in heap big trouble as regards cash flow.
So, what did they do? They somehow were able to get themselves featured on Gordon Ramsey's "Kitchen Nightmares" reality television show. Amy was convinced that this would put a stop to the "haters" and "bloggers" who were ruining her life.
This episode aired recently and, to put it lightly, it did not go very well. There were problems that were too numerous to list but here are a few of the highlights:
1. Small restaurant with way too many items on the menu. This is actually a very, very common problem with a lot of small restaurants. The problem is that when there are too many items on the menu it becomes rather difficult to control food cost. Put another way, a lot of food is wasted because it cannot be purchased and stored in small enough quantities before it goes bad and has to be discarded. Failing to control food cost is probably the number one or number two reason that restaurants fail with "failing to control labor cost" being neck and neck with it. (The other big cause of failing to control food cost is oversized portions. You see that when food is left on the plate because the customer simply couldn't eat that much.)
2. Employee turnover rate is too high. This little, tiny restaurant went through something like 100 employees in its most recent year. That is ridiculous and can only be explained properly by watching the episode.
3. The chef (Amy) cannot cook food properly. Again, you have to watch the episode to have a proper appreciation for just how bad this is.
4. The owners steal the tips from their staff. Yeah, that's hard to believe but they do it and, in their own minds, justify doing it.
5. The owners are incapable of properly communicating with each other. Has to be seen to be believed.
6. The owners are hostile to their clientele. I mean
really, really hostile to the point of retaliatory violence. Has to be seen to be believed.
7. The owners are hostile to the expert (Gordon Ramsey) who
they invited to help them repair their reputation. Apparently, Amy and Samy thought that Chef Ramsey would visit their little eating establishment and a) find nothing wrong at all and then b) tell the world via his television show that Amy and Samy are the best restauranteurs in the entire state of Arizona if not the entire country and then all of their problems would go away. When this did not happen they both went ballistic,
especially Amy.
Think this is all there is to it? Think again.
After the episode of "Kitchen Nightmares" aired (a little over a week ago), the Facebook page for "Amy's Baking Company" went from a few hundred to over 95,000 followers. Apparently everyone wanted to get in on the train wreck. Any way that Amy and Samy would react graciously to a few thousand new critics? Not a chance. First, they responded personally to hundreds of their new Facebook friends with profanity and vulgarity usually associated with sailors and Marines. Then, when someone pointed out to them something about the first rule of holes, they resorted to the Anthony Weiner school of stupid excuses and claimed that their Facebook account had been hacked and that they never said all of those awful things.
This is a textbook example of how to do just about everything wrong in small business in general and in the restaurant business in particular. It's both breathtaking and hilarious in its cringe-worthiness.
I suggest that you start by watching the "Kitchen Nightmares" episode:
Then read the FNC follow up story to what happened next by clicking
here. Finally, as a bonus, visit the Facebook page for "Amy's Baking Company" by clicking
here. They decided to shut down for a few days and are getting ready for a "Grand Re-Opening" this coming Tuesday so I expect that things are only going to spiral further out of control after that. Even Martha Stewart is getting in on the action...she is now following Amy's Facebook page and has posted a picture of "Crazy Amy" on her own page. It's also pretty obvious that Amy and Samy have taken to creating fake Facebook accounts to comment on their own page about how wonderful the restaurant is and how horrible their critics are. No one is fooled.