RECIPES
Indian empire
Camellia Panjabi brought authentic Indian food to the UK in the 1980s. Now, at 83, she’s putting her homeland’s vegetable dishes front and centre
When Camellia Panjabi was a child, her mother forbade her to eat street food in her home city of Mumbai. This just made her crave it even more. ‘It became an obsession,’ she says. ‘Street-food stands depend on word of mouth, so the taste profile is always exquisite.’
That rebelliousness – and passion for food – has endured. Now 83, the chef and restaurateur is credited with challenging perceptions of Indian food in the UK. Alongside her sister and brother-in-law, she has introduced diners to the authentic dishes from different regions of India, rather than the British adaptations you’d expect from a high-street curry house. A tastemaker in the culinary world, she runs an empire of trailblazing London restaurants, and wrote the world’s best-selling curry book, 50 Great Curries of India. Selling two million copies since 1994, it sought to disprove the assumption that ‘curry’ was one dish. In 2013, Camellia received an MBE for services to the hospitality industry.
She moved to the UK to study economics at Cambridge, later becoming marketing director of India’s most prestigious hotel group, Taj Hotels. Tasked with attracting customers to hotel restaurants, she travelled around India on a culinary journey that would inform both her seminal cookbook and her London menus.