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Restaurants can be devilishly difficult to get into, particularly Gordon Ramsay's. But even this most exacting of chefs normally draws the line at forcing diners to queue with their passports in a building site. Ah, the delights of Terminal 5.
Ramsay's Plane Food was to transform airport eating, saving passengers from refuelling mid-air on the scarcely air-worthy "all-day deli counter". But first one must touch down at the airside restaurant, past veritable continents of check-in desks and seas of hard hats: forget Hell's Kitchen, think Hell's Airport. To be on board at the restaurant for 7pm, I'm told to start hovering at Terminal 5 by 2pm. So in the time it takes to crawl a few hundred yards, one could virtually fly to Africa. Expectations, then, are plummeting: will my pollock end up in Benidorm, my white asparagus in Vladivostok? And will the bill land in a different time zone, long after one's plane has departed?
Having survived my adventure to this echoing warehouse in Outer Hounslow, muttering that BA should start issuing Land Miles, I'm pleasantly surprised that Plane Food is (a) finished and (b) a proper restaurant, off the main drag and bursting with light. Ramsay, apparently, was equally surprised when he saw it on a fleeting tour of his restaurant: really it is becoming another day, another opening of a McRamsay's. No surprise, then, that he will even offer takeaways to munch on board.
Rival...