After their appearance on Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares catapulted them from being the cranky owners of a Scottsdale, AZ, restaurant to worldwide infamy, the owners of Amy’s Baking Company haven’t really been talking to the media, except to occasionally shout at the cameras that they can’t talk to the media. Then this morning Amy and husband Samy sat down for a local radio interview with another person who has Gordon to thank for her few minutes of fame.

Monti Carlo is a host on My 103.9 in Phoenix, and also a veteran of last summer’s MasterChef, one of the 4.2 trillion shows Ramsay hosts for FOX. Perhaps calling upon their shared experiences with Chef Ramsay, Monti managed to get Amy and Samy to sit down for an interview in which Amy managed to (mostly) keep her cool and Samy was basically muzzled.

Of course, not all of the interview is uploaded to YouTube yet, so maybe we’re jumping the gun on those statements.

Regardless, Amy claims that their goals for being on Kitchen Nightmares wasn’t to get an upgrade to their menu or decor, but to show people that all the naysayers on Yelp were wrong.

“We simply wanted to bring attention to our beloved restaurant and show the world and really stand up to online bullies because we’ve been subjected to that for the last three years,” says Amy.

It was, according to Amy, Yelpers that actually brought the restaurant to the attention of the Kitchen Nightmares producers. She says that the show asked Arizonans which area restaurant most needed Ramsay’s help. Given Amy’s past overly heated exchanges with Yelp reviewers, it’s no surprise they picked out Amy’s Baking Company.

“We didn’t feel they had anything to come to us for,” she tells Monti. “The only problem we’ve ever had is with online bullies.”

She says she was misled by producers.

“They told us they were coming to help and we believed them,” explains Amy. “That’s why we invited them into our kitchen; we had nothing to hide.”

As for the now-famous incident that occurred on the first night of filming — before Ramsay ever stepped foot in the place — in which Amy and Samy chased a couple of disgruntled customers out of the restaurant, screaming profanity and threatening to call the police, Amy puts the blame for that scene on Yelp.

“The Yelpers that I knew about — These people that consistently for three years had been badgering us and threatening to kill, saying the most horrific things, those people I knew that they were going to come to the restaurant,” she recalls. “I knew they were gonna come just to set us up to make us look like we didn’t know what we were doing on national television.”

She says that when things started to turn sour during that evening, she knew it was those darned Yelpers.

“I started to notice a few people come in the restaurant that looked familiar to me, and as I saw how things were going and how out of control it was getting… I grabbed the producers, I said ‘They are Yelpers. I know two of ’em for sure are. I have their names and there profiles right here,'” she tells Monti. “My husband and I started to feel that we were being surrounded by Yelpers, completely set up. We didn’t feel that we were going to have a true, authentic way to show our product. We were right.”

She adds, “The people that were there, the people that we are screaming at — when I am screaming ‘call the police, call the police’ — and the people that my husband is screaming those obscenities at, they are not our customers, they are Yelpers.

“I can prove it; they even went on Yelp and talked about it after.”
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Amy says the Yelpers went to her restaurant that night “with harmful, malicious intent.”

“My husband and I said, ‘Wait a minute, we are not comfortable. You are endangering our lives.'”

A much better radio host than I could hope to be, Monti manages to not only avoid laughing at that statement, but also to suss out what Amy actually means to say — that people who write negative reviews and attempt to make you look bad are endangering your livelihood, and by extension, your life.

There’s apparently still more to this interview, as the radio station has only managed to upload 4 of the 7 parts to YouTube (and part 1 is just a preview). We’ll keep our eye out for the remaining segments but you can also look on the My 103.9 YouTube page.

Anyway, Amy’s is having a grand re-opening Tuesday night, for which it hosted a job fair to find people willing to work for a place where the owners admittedly kept tips from the wait staff, and fired others for simply asking reasonable questions.

If anyone manages to attend the re-opening, we’d love to hear from you!

Below are the clips from the radio interview that have been uploaded to YouTube:

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