What was Amy’s Baking Company?
Amy’s Baking Company was a small bistro and bakery in a north Scottsdale strip center that became, for a few months in 2013, the most talked-about restaurant in the country. It sat at 7366 E Shea Blvd, Suite 112, in the back corner of the Shea Scottsdale Shopping Center at Scottsdale Road and Shea Boulevard, across from Harkins Theatres Shea 14, in the Shea Corridor.
The owners were a married couple, Amy Bouzaglo (born Amanda Bossingham), a self-taught baker and cook who grew up in the Valley, and Samy Bouzaglo, who ran the front of the house. An Arizona Republic timeline says Samy put more than a million dollars into building the restaurant in 2007; Phoenix New Times later dated the opening to 2008. Amy told New Times she decorated the black-and-white room herself, down to the Venetian plaster. The menu was simple bistro food, pizza, pasta, crepes, soups with her challah, and the house desserts that were the point of the name.
For years it was, in New Times critic Laura Hahnefeld’s words, a place that “humdrummed along,” with a pre- and post-movie trade from the theater across the lot. That changed when Fox’s Kitchen Nightmares filmed there in December 2012. The episode aired on May 10, 2013, and showed the couple arguing with customers and staff and keeping servers’ tips; Gordon Ramsay, for the first time in the series, walked away without finishing. Days later the restaurant’s social media erupted with combative posts, which the owners said were the work of hackers, and the story went viral.
The restaurant stayed open for more than two years after that, as a tourist stop. It closed on September 1, 2015, according to the Arizona Republic; the owners said the reason was a landlord dispute, not the show. B&R Wine and Food, a French bistro, took Suite 112 that fall.
Our verdict: Amy’s Baking Company matters to Scottsdale’s restaurant history as a media event, not as a kitchen, and the record supports that reading more than either side’s version of it.
What the restaurant was, from the record
The menu. The kitchen served a short bistro list. Pizza drew the 2010 Yelp review that started the online feud: a Margherita the reviewer, Joel LaTondress, found underwhelming. The red pepper ravioli became famous when Ramsay called it one of the most confusing ravioli dishes he had tasted, and the episode alleged that ravioli described as fresh was store-bought. In 2014 Amy told New Times she made two soups daily, one always vegetarian, served with her homemade challah, and that she baked the pastries herself, posting step-by-step videos to answer claims that the desserts came from Costco.
The other review. In February 2013, after the filming but before the broadcast, the restaurant appeared on PBS’s Check Please! Arizona, hosted by chef Robert McGrath. Amy described the concept as farm-fresh organic food made from scratch, and the three diners on the panel called the room charming and comfortable and the pastries incredible. One praised the same red pepper ravioli as sweet, spicy and delicious. New Times set the two programs side by side in its May 2013 cover story and asked which one had bent reality further.
The room. It was small, tidy and black and white, with an outdoor patio, and posted dinner hours of 5 to 10 p.m. in May 2013. New Times described it as quaint and extremely tidy when its reporter spent two hours there in November 2014, with one kitchen employee besides Amy.
After the show. The restaurant closed briefly in May 2013, then announced a grand reopening. Its public relations firm resigned the next day, according to the Arizona Republic. Through 2014 and 2015 visitors came to see the place more than to eat in it; New Times found strangers peering through the windows and photographing the menu a week after the broadcast.
Getting there now. You cannot. Suite 112 was B&R Wine and Food by the end of 2015, an affordable bistro and wine bar named for its French owners, Bruno and Richard, with $6 wine by the glass before 6 p.m.
A strip-mall bistro and the internet
The Amy’s Baking Company story began years before the cameras. On August 1, 2010, a Phoenix diner posted a one-star Yelp review complaining about the pizza and about Samy’s response to his criticism. The next day Amy answered in a 450-word reply, and when New Times’ food blog covered the exchange she argued with readers in the comments. “You will see the Messiah before you see our doors closed,” she wrote, a line New Times quoted in 2013. The paper also recorded, as the couple themselves later discussed, that the restaurant had closed for a period around 2008 while Amy served a prison sentence for a 2001 credit fraud to which she had pleaded guilty.
In November 2012 a Kitchen Nightmares producer invited the community to the filming, set for December 8 to 11. A diner told New Times that the first night ended with shouting and a 911 hang-up call that police answered. When the hour aired on May 10, 2013, Ramsay ended it by telling the couple, “I think you’re too far gone.” On May 13 the restaurant’s Facebook page filled with posts attacking critics; on May 14 they disappeared, replaced by a statement that the accounts had been hacked. The restaurant’s critics answered with abuse of their own, which New Times’ Hahnefeld described as a mob that seemed bent on reversing civility. Forbes held up the episode as a lesson in how not to handle social media. Fox aired a follow-up, Return to Amy’s Baking Company, on April 11, 2014.
The couple never conceded much. “Of course, there is no bad publicity,” Samy told New Times in 2014. Amy planned a cookbook and a campaign against online “bullies.” In July 2015 they said they were selling, and the Arizona Republic reported the restaurant closed on September 1. They moved to California in 2016 and to Israel in 2018, after Samy was deported. In 2021 Amy told the New York Post that producers had manipulated what viewers saw, claims the paper did not verify.
Honest assessment: by every account we found, Amy’s Baking Company was an unremarkable restaurant before May 2013, and the record does not let anyone judge the food fairly after it; Ramsay and the Check Please! panel tasted the same ravioli and disagreed. Its place in Scottsdale’s 2010s is as the city’s most famous restaurant brawl. It belongs in the lost column as a reminder that reviews, and replies to reviews, can outlive a restaurant by a decade or more.