Gordon Ramsay’s game plan in now clear. As part of the PR blitz accompanying the launch of his Heathrow operation (yesterday), he has indicated that, within five years, he wants to build a business worth £200m.

The plan explicitly involves taking the “huge amounts of cash” generated by media stardom – £8m from Channel 4, for example! – and investing that money to build a huge multi-level catering empire. As he admitted to the Evening Standard, “[y]ou can’t make that kind of money from food… It would be nice to spend less time on TV but it would, overall, limit what we could achieve.”

Diversification from fine dining into the mid-market is not about dumbing down, he insists, but about creating a more secure business.

And a very big business too. To put it in context, Ramsay‘s stated goal, a value of £200m, involves build an empire worth just under half the current stock exchange valuation of Gondola Holdings,

Who they? Well, Gondola own not just Ask! and Nando’s, but also PizzaExpress which has been in the mass-catering business for over 40 years. They have over 500 restaurants over 11,000 employees. Their turnover currently approaches ten times Ramsay’s.

Even to build a business one third Gondola’s size would be a huge business achievement. It would need a strong management structure that is more than Chris Hutcheson (Ramsay’s father-in-law) – however able he may be – in occasional telephonic consultation with Ramsay, often off filming.

Whether it will be possible to recruit and retain the right management for an organisation already so dominated by two very strong characters must be open to some question.

And as to the quality of the product? Backwards, ever backwards, if the current trends continue. Ever since Ramsay’s organisation went beyond two restaurants (the Chelsea flagship and Pétrus), the law of diminishing returns appears to have set in. The ‘diffusion’ fine dining restaurants, such as those at Claridge’s, the Connaught, the Savoy and the Berkeley are (or were) thoroughly undistinguished, culinarily-speaking – largely dependent for their lustre on the ever-growing credulity of Michelin’s inspectors.

And the more the group casts around for avenues to exploit – New York (critical disaster on launch, chef sacked), Noisette (critical yawn, closed), Foxtrot Oscar (critical disaster, to be relaunched) – the more dead ends it seems to encounter. First news of the Heathrow operation suggests there’s “more wrong with Plane Food [than] right about it”.

On the gastropubs, the jury is still out. But let’s asssume they’re going to be a raging ongoing success, and the true course to Ramsay’s greater riches – he’s still going to need an awful lot of ’em to build a £200m business.