Gordon Ramsay Is Really Opening Anything These Days — Plus More New Restaurants

The shouty chef branches out to Ealing

Gordon Ramsay is continuing with his unfettered belief that where countless casual dining chains have failed, Gordon Ramsay can succeed. Not satisfied with opening a clutch of Street Pizza and Street Burger restaurants — many of them on the graveyards of other pizza and burger restaurants that began small, expanded too quickly, and collapsed due to overextension — he will now add a third Bread Street Kitchen to London with an opening in Ealing, according to Propel. The other two, in St. Paul’s and Southwark respectively, offer a straightforward, something unadventurously pan-European for everyone menu, which will play well on the chain-dominated stretch of Ealing’s Broadway shopping centre it is slated to occupy. It, along with a clutch of new restaurant openings, shows that while the opening cycle is returning to a more regular cadence, it is doing so in a market that is increasingly hostile for small independents and increasingly geared towards chains and powerful indie-corporate groups.

And in other new openings...

• Popular Westbourne Grove restaurant Taqueria will open a second site on Exmouth Market, replacing all-day coffee chain Grind. The restaurant is one of the city’s longest-standing decent places for tacos, and a frontage for the Cool Chile Co, the Mexican ingredient company from owners
• Richard Caring’s bafflingly popular Ivy Asia is opening a gargantuan restaurant on South Audley Street, opposite the upcoming BiBi from JKS Restaurants.
• A bar is coming to Islington to flog £100 cocktails laden with premium spirits. Chateau Lafite 2008 in a cocktail? If you wish. [Hot Dinners]
• Santa Maria, the outstanding Neapolitan pizza outfit, has moved out of its original restaurant on St. Mary’s Road in Ealing and moved in to Bond Street, about 400m away. It will use the vacant site for a vegan restaurant called Vergine Maria.
• Not content with parks of boxes, Boxpark will open a hall of Boxes, or rather, BoxHall, in Bristol. It’s a food hall, box-style.

And in other restaurant and food news...

• A Brexit grace period on the export of “chilled pork products” from Britain to Northern Ireland is on the verge of expiry, and Boris Johnson is probably going to try to extend it, so the press has naturally turned it into an EU TRADE WAR ON SAUSAGES. [Mirror]
• No-shows in restaurants are once again making headlines as they resume indoor dining, but the discussion remains circular. [BBC News]
• Good tweet: