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Gordon Ramsay Adds (Too Much?) to His Empire

by Zoe Strimpel
Sun, 20 Jan 2008 at 2:41 PM

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Gordon Ramsay continues his takeover of the world apace, with a European triple whammy. His new restaurant in Heathrow's Terminal 5 is set to open in March. The menu at Plane Food (one doubts the honesty of that pun — could it be ironic?) will be overseen by the sprightly, talented Stuart Gillies of another of Ramsay's ventures, the Boxwood Café. Then there's the Warrington Arms, opening in a classic Victorian building in Maida Vale, a posh neighborhood in North West London. It's the third in Ramsay's line of gastropubs, but getting a table will be more like the process in a fancy restaurant, if the Narrow, his riverside pub in East London, is anything to go by. And finally, the Trianon Palace and Spa, his first — and possibly most contentious — foray to France, in a large hotel near Versailles Palace.

Can Mr. Ramsay have reached the saturation point? There would seem a threshold beyond which a truly gourmet chef loses out on quality in the seemingly endless pursuit of quantity. A poster has appeared on the Tube, showing the chef's face against infernal red, with the words "STOP THIS RAMSAY EXPANSION." Time Out says wearily of Plane Food: "Expect huge amounts of hot air, high decibels and heavy punnage emanating from the Gordon Ramsay PR machine as his Heathrow restaurant taxis for lift-off."

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