It smells like fried food around lunchtime at Gordon Ramsay Street Pizza and Gordon Ramsay Street Burger. That’s not a surprise. The restaurant in Washington’s high-end Penn Quarter neighborhood serves a slew of popular offerings like Hotter Than Hell Dirty Fries and Idiot Smash Burgers.
But even after lunch service has waned, the stale scent of salty fries and burgers hangs in the air in some of the upscale condominiums floors above the restaurant in the mixed-use building. The greasy odor is not what owners had in mind when they purchased their pricey digs.
Residents say it doesn’t just smell bad — it’s unhealthy. According to air monitor measurements they provided, levels of particulate matter are well above the World Health Organization’s air quality guidelines and are in keeping with the kind of pollutants released by grease exhaust.
The residents are convinced the scents and dangerous particulates are coming from the restaurant. After all, they say, this whole chapter began after Gordon Ramsay Street Pizza expanded its concept to bring Gordon Ramsay Street Burger and its fried menu items into the two-level space last summer.
The particulate levels spike during restaurant operating hours, according to months’ worth of readouts of an in-unit air monitor provided to The Washington Post by residents and an air quality report conducted at the behest of the condo association.
Some residents avoid their units until the restaurant closes and wear N95 masks when they’re home. They have suffered from increased coughing and irritated eyes, they say. The occupants of one unit say that if things don’t improve, they’ll have to move.
They want the restaurant to let them inspect the venting, see diagrams of the build-out and conduct tests to conclusively determine the cause of the issues. After months of back-and-forth, the restaurant group and its landlord, Douglas Development, refused.
In correspondence with the condo association, Gordon Ramsay Restaurants and Douglas Development denied a role in the odorous affair, citing conversations with their contractor and knowledge of the building systems. The scents, they said, more likely come from residents cooking in their units.
“We’re looking into it,” said Zachary Kramer, an associate of investments and capital markets at Douglas Development, when reached by phone. He declined to comment further.
Representatives of Gordon Ramsay Restaurants Global, Gordon Ramsay Street Pizza and Gordon Ramsay Street Burger have not responded to multiple requests for comment, including questions about a detailed list of allegations made by residents.
Now, the parties are gridlocked.
“I hate when you have to involve lawyers and spend our assessments on attorneys, but at this point, there are people hurting,” said Steve Leinwand, who has lived in the building for more than 20 years. His two-bedroom condo is one of the units that has a greasy odor, though it does not suffer poor air quality. “They can’t just write it off and say, ‘Well, there’s nothing we can do about it.’ Because they are clearly the cause, and there’s something in the system that has got to be repaired.”
Terrell Place is a mixed-use building that was once the historic flagship Hecht’s Department Store. The building has 29 residential units in total; six of them have been affected by the odors and air particulates to varying degrees. Those six are located in two vertical stacks on top of the restaurant. A two-bedroom, 2,740-square-foot condo on the ninth floor, replete with quartz counters and an open floor plan, is on the market for $1.35 million — and it’s not one of the affected apartments.
Celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay opened his first D.C. restaurant, Gordon Ramsay Fish & Chips, at the Wharf in November 2022. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser marked the occasion by joining him for a cooking competition. He opened Gordon Ramsay Hell’s Kitchen nearby in January 2023, and then he opened the first U.S.-based location of Gordon Ramsay Street Pizza a block from Capital One Arena in June 2024.
“I can’t wait for you to now get a taste of my delicious smash burgers, fried chicken sandwiches and more!” Ramsay posted on Instagram in late July 2025, announcing that Gordon Ramsay Street Burger would take up residence in the basement of his pizza restaurant. Gordon Ramsay Restaurants is a tenant of Douglas Development, which owns the ground and first-floor units in the building.
By the fall of that year, “we started getting a lot of complaints from the residents of our building about the grease and particulate matter penetrating the building at various floors and various levels,” said Ralph Terkowitz, the board president of the Terrell Place Condominium Association. “That’s a problem we have to solve to create a livable building.”
For one resident, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for security reasons because of a family member’s position in the U.S. government, the odors became inescapable beginning in late July 2025 and persisted throughout the fall. They stopped cooking in their unit and disconnected and sealed their microwave exhaust vent in November, but the problems continued.
“The smell just hits you like running into a wall,” the resident said, and the “hamburger grease grill smells” last for eight to nine hours each day. The two air purifiers the resident bought to help reduce harmful particulates “only help at the margins,” they said.
The issue wasn’t limited to the condos. The building’s roof, which boasts views of the Hirshhorn Museum and the Washington Monument, also features a distinctly burger-like smell coming out of one of the exhaust stacks, a Washington Post reporter observed. The condo association has fielded grousing from residents about the smell in the building’s lobby and staircase, too.
While the odor is a problem, residents say, the more concerning issue is the air quality.
The air monitor in one unit measured particles that are 2.5 microns or smaller, also known as fine particles, which pose the greatest risk to health, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Even low levels of exposure are harmful, especially for vulnerable populations, because the particles penetrate the lungs. The levels that one resident said their air monitor registered were on par with inhaling heavy wildfire smoke.
In January, the building manager sent Douglas Development the first communication that expressed worries with odor, but it was focused on the pizza restaurant rather than the burger one. The forwarded resident complaint outlined concerns with the “unbearable” pizza scent that is “strongest when the restaurant is full of people in the evenings and is not noticeable in the mornings before it opens.” The wall surrounding one of the outlets in the condo had become discolored and, per the complaint, “black exhaust dust falls out” when the resident removed the outlet cover. The email also included a photograph of an outside vent, which showed stains on the facade.
Kramer, of Douglas Development, responded with an action plan: a deep-cleaning of the flue, a leak test of the system and a test of the fan’s functionality. The company also brought out an engineer to ensure there was no immediate fire risk, per the email.
At first, correspondence between the parties showed a willingness to work together, even after that first action plan didn’t resolve the residents’ issues. Representatives of Gordon Ramsay Restaurants told the building manager that they spoke with the original installer, who confirmed that the restaurant used a different venting system than the residential units, according to emails provided by lawyer Vanessa Carpenter Lourie, who represents the condo association.
However, residents and the property manager remained convinced that the restaurant and residence vents had been connected, leading to the odor and particulates entering some of the condos, per emails. At the very least, they said they needed access to the restaurant to figure out how to solve the problem.
By March, Kramer considered the matter done. “After discussing internally, we feel that we have made a good-faith effort to investigate these complaints over the past few months,” he wrote in an email to the property manager, outlining an on-site visit earlier that month, which included the contractor who did the original build-out for the restaurant.
“We pointed out to him the specific locations of the vents (street level and the side of the building) and he concluded that there was no way these are getting into the building above,” Kramer wrote in the email. “… We appreciate your diligence but given the meeting on site with the contractor as well as our knowledge of the building systems, we do not believe this issue is related to our restaurant.”
The condo association was not satisfied, and the property manager continued to request the drawings and permits for the restaurant. “They’re basically saying, ‘We don’t have a problem,’” Terkowitz said. But the particulates and the odors continued, and he believed the key to solving that issue was somewhere in the ductwork that the restaurant wouldn’t let them inspect.
In May, the tenant association complained to the air quality section of the D.C. Department of Energy and the Environment. An inspector went to the building the following day but did not identify any violations.
“While during the inspection our inspector did observe ductwork visible along the restaurant ceiling that appeared to lead to external vents on E and 7th Streets, DOEE does not regulate building venting and the inspector did not perform a more detailed investigation for potential interior venting connections from the restaurant,” wrote Jacob Zangrilli, the chief of the compliance and enforcement branch at the DOEE air quality division, in response to the complaint. He explained that indoor air quality issues are largely not within the agency’s purview.
Douglas Development and Gordon Ramsay Restaurants have since cited the lack of inspection violations as further exoneration of the restaurant, according to emails.
The inspection has not swayed the condo association, which is considering taking its complaints to another city agency, like the Department of Buildings.
Terkowitz and other residents attempted to snake the vents to see whether they could find a connection between the residential and restaurant ducts. However, the kinks and turns of the ducts foiled their attempt.
The condo association hired the firm Engineering Consulting Services to conduct indoor air quality testing of the building. Douglas Development and Gordon Ramsay Street Burger did not provide access to the restaurant or its venting system for the assessment.
The resulting report found a “strong smoky odor” by the afternoon hours in the units where occupants had complained. Among the findings: that particulates spiked at noon and approximately 5 p.m. While the report noted that the assessment wasn’t designed to identify the source of the particulates, the timeline could “be concluded as correlating with opening and subsequent operation of the restaurant as the most logical source.”
To more conclusively determine the source, the report said, ECS would want to conduct sampling with the restaurant’s kitchen, exhaust system and cooking operations.
But a late-July email from Rachel Poyntz-Baker, Gordon Ramsay Restaurants Global general counsel, said, “At this time, we do not agree to provide access to the premises for the installation of equipment or the proposed testing.”
Leinwand wants to picket the restaurant. “Get it fixed. Be a human, be a neighbor,” he said. “If I want to put a poster board down there with some direct statements about, ‘Please consider eating somewhere else because of this,’ I mean, how can they sit there and go, ‘Oh well’?” So far, the board has told him to hold off.
He added that residents are also concerned about the effect on their property values if the problem isn’t solved. “Because who would want to come in here?” he said. “You smell it, you go, ‘I’m not going to move in here.’”
Terkowitz said he isn’t concerned about spending some of the condo association’s reserves to continue adjudicating this matter, because “we’re confident we’re in the right.”
This isn’t about trying to get rid of the restaurant, Terkowitz emphasized. He wants to see a bustling neighborhood and doesn’t object to the idea of a food establishment on the ground floor. Instead, he said, he remains concerned that one tenant is making the building unsafe and unhealthy for others and won’t let them inspect it.
“To have a situation where Gordon Ramsay won’t let us into a unit — I can’t tolerate that,” he said.
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