 Thanks, Melina. And thanks for this exercise in humility. I get to follow a Pulitzer Prize winner, an NFL player, James Beard award-winning chef and writer, and then I get to speak to somebody who is officially excellent, like actually for her culinary contributions to the United Kingdom. The queen appointed Chef Romy Gill to the most excellent order of the British Empire. I will strive for excellence my whole life and never be appointed to any order of any nature. At her restaurant, Romy's Kitchen, Chef Gill serves a singular Punjabi Bengali-inspired cuisine that's captured imaginations and I think asks some really vital questions about what it means to cook British food. I'm going to try to ask her some of those questions today. Please welcome Romy Gill. Thank you. Hi, Chef. Hi. Are you nervous? We were, but after all the amazing, you know, what we listened, it was so emotional. Yeah. And we thought we're going to have some positive. Yeah, I thought you were going to say after all the mescal shots you were feeling OK now, but I think, yeah, I agree. After the ice cream. After the ice cream. Yes, give me some sugar rush. If you don't mind, can we just start at the very beginning? Will you tell me a little bit about how you grew up and got into cooking and food? I came to UK about 25 years ago. I'm a self-taught, so I didn't go to any culinary institute. And when I moved to UK, you leave your family, you're excited about, you know, a different culture coming from a different place. And when I came to UK, I got really, really excited about so many various things. But then I missed my family, my friends I grew up with, the food I grew up with. And my husband could see how I was getting a bit depressed, you know. And he said, let's take you out to Indian restaurant. And I tell you, I was super excited. I was so happy that I'm going to Indian, eat Indian food. And I went to the Indian restaurant. This is no joke. Every curry tasted the same. So it was 10 pounds of lager and a curry. So if you know lager means beer, so it's 10 pounds of lager and a curry, kind of each tasted the same. And 25 years ago I decided I'm going to open a restaurant. And my husband looked at me and then about five years ago I did. So how old were you when you moved to the UK? 22. Yeah. And what brought you? My husband is a chip designer. He designs computer chip. He came to study here. And while he was doing his masters and he got a job and I followed him here. And so at what point were you already cooking, I mean you said yourself top, but were you cooking at home? How did you decide that you would begin cooking professionally? So when I was growing up, I did not like to go in the kitchen. I was very chubby. I loved eating food. I don't know what you're talking about at all. Used to say come and help me. And any excuse, I would run away and pray cricket with my brother. So I would say I tend to enjoy cooking, I loved eating. What was fascinated was India is such a big country. It's the regional food, the traditions are different, the cultures are different. Every household cooks food so differently. So talk about your specific household. I hate the idea that this happens to a lot of cuisines where you have a huge country and a super diverse, rich culture and then it's like, oh, it's Indian food. There's more than one Indian food, right? So what was it like? What kind of food did you grow up eating? My dad worked in a steel plant from Punjabi family, which is not India. But my dad worked in West Bengal, which is East India, if you know the map of India. So people came from all over India to work there. So I grew up in a Punjabi household family into very lentils, a lot of vegetarians eating meat in the weekend kind of stuff. And Bengali eat staple diet is practically fish and rice. They eat a lot of fish, fish every day. And I loved eating fish. I think in between Punjabi and Bengali, I fluctuate. I was just talking to Pratik. Pratik is an amazing chef from India. And I was talking to him and I said, I fluctuate when I want to be Bengali. I want to be a Punjabi. It depends what mood I am. So bring me back to that first Indian meal in the UK, ten loggers and a curry. Like, did you leave that saying like, I'm opening a restaurant. This is this is a nightmare. Or like, what happened between that experience? Was it just like you kept missing this variety and diversity of cuisine or talk me through your process there? I think now in the UK, we have this amazing multicultural community, amazing, amazing Indian food and diverse food from all over UK, from all over India. But what I started doing, started doing parties at home, cooking for people, starting my own little catering business, making sauces and you know, I just wanted to do it. I didn't want to open a restaurant which I didn't know anything about it. So I kind of started from my kitchen, that's my name of my restaurant, it's Romi's kitchen. It meant, because I started it from the kitchen. And it just became big. And I wasn't scared to ask people to give me opportunity. Don't pay me, just give me an opportunity. I used to go and work in the restaurants, I want to learn. Or cookery demos or go to cookery schools and teach and learn from people. I think that was kind of my journey. I started writing to people. And what kind of places did you go to learn? Did you feel like you wanted to learn specifically from Indian chefs? Or was it different than that? Did you want to learn a more general approach? I didn't go to any Indian restaurant, I just went to Indian restaurants where I wrote to them and then they really helped me with my success. And for me, my success completely changed. Alan Jenkins is sitting somewhere. He's the editor of OafM. I think I bought him, I wrote to him all the time and said, I want to write, I want to write. And eventually, I think he gave up. He thought this moment is not going to give up. Is that true, Alan? How would you dream if you have a mentor? I think mentor is really important in your life. And then there are people who will mentor you, train you, and which I do to the women in the industry now. And I think that's really, really important. So I think I know a little bit about the idea of Indian cuisine in England. But painting me like a more of a picture than that first meal, like why did you think that, what hole were you trying to fill there? What did you want to do differently than other people? What was missing from your experiences there? What did you think you were going to bring to people that you were feeding? See, when I had the first meal, I still remember that my fingers were pink when I came back home. Shouldn't be pink, you know? What? So it's the coloring they use in the restaurants. I think it's changed from 25 years, it's changed, we have some fantastic restaurants. And I still have the sweet, horrible, gel-frazy, so-called curry, which I had. And I just cannot, and announced with full, so thick, that I needed to learn how to cook it in the tandoor, so I can do any kind of nouns you want me to do, you know? I can make them, but the nouns need to be crispy, they need to be light, they don't need to be doughy. So that kind of stick to my mind. And in my restaurant now I have very traditional recipes and I don't think everything, I just hate the word apente city. I think there's no word as apente anymore because we live in a world where people come from all over the world and learn from different traditions. And I took on the traditional recipes, like I serve octopus in my restaurant. So I'll do tamarind octopus with punch foreign. Punch foreign is a five spice, which Indian five spice, whole spice. So I'll do some things like that, but I keep my traditional recipes that I grew up with, the family I ate at home and I all went to my friend's house. So kind of, you know, put that in my restaurant. Do you feel yourself having to deal with different expectations of what you're going to serve when people come to your restaurant, do they expect what they're used to, tikka masala and things like that and soft nouns? I think when I opened five years ago, people did. And when Vendalu, people like, I only came to this country when I came to UK. Vendalu's very Portuguese going dish and it's cooked with pork and, you know, it's very vinegary, it's got the red cheese and it's very much in Bombay and Goa, they're served. And if you go to any parts of India, they wouldn't even know about it. So it was like madras chicken. I don't know what madras chicken is. I have no idea, you know. And tikka masala or bolty, bolty means bucket, right? So they were maybe they were asking you for a bucket of tikka masala. I don't do that. Does that bother you at that point? Were you offended by that? Or did you feel like you were upset that people were coming to you? Or did it not move you like that? I think when I feel quite fierce at times when I was asked to put loads of chilies and one of my front of the house, they kind of push pulled me because I get so, you know, chilies, yes, there should be chilies in the food, but it shouldn't be overpowering, right? Isn't it? What is the deal? It's the same thing with Chinese food. Like people come in and they're like, I want the extra spicy. I want the Chinese spicy version, the Thai spicy version. Like white people are sorry. So like into how spicy the food is, right? Seems a little spooky. I had a beer before I came here. But it doesn't, it didn't upset you didn't force you to change your cooking or did you find yourself making these kinds of concessions? And okay, okay, we'll do it really spicy. Like what? I don't want to do it. If you want extra spice, I'll give you some chilies that we do in India, like onions and chilies on the side with lemon. I'll do that. But I literally had to throw one guy out of the restaurant because I could not take it anymore because he wanted more chilies, more chilies, more chilies. And I said, look, there is another restaurant very near to me that serves that. Please go there. So I had to say that. I think you have to have that be very strong. So, you know, there are very few Indian women in the industry in the UK, probably all over the world, very few. And if you don't fight your corners, especially being a very small restaurant in a very small town, you need to fight your corners. You need to be different from others. Do you think it would have been harder in a bigger city or was it harder in a smaller city to break through as a woman, an Indian woman? I think I did the right thing being in a small town. Started my career from there. London would have been a lot expensive, isn't it, Alan? The prices are just, the rates are so high. And every second there's a new restaurant opening. So I think it would have been harder there. In the states where you can hear from my accent I come from, restaurants, even if they're opened by people who have grown up and been born and spent their entire lives in America, if they're serving a cuisine that's not what people would consider to be American, they get penned into this term, ethnic restaurants. Is this a thing that you feel happens in the UK like that although curry and Indian flavors and ingredients are so intrinsic to the cuisine there, it's still like a separate conversation? See, when my dad, my dad's a great cook, he always said that cooking is all about getting a meal on a table. It's about everyone has a fascination of food, right? And food allows us to explore different cultures, methods, tradition and techniques. I think there is a lot of negativity around hospitality industry but also it gives me, this is where I belong. If you're telling me to go and work somewhere else I can't, this is where I am. I'm happy here, I love what I do. And I find really positive things as a commercial kitchens are some of the most successful, integrated multi-culture, environmentally. It's just the honesty and don't need to be born with the culinary skills of that tradition. You can learn in the kitchens. So for me to go and learn something else like I now have a very, very good friend who is from Japan and he taught me how to do, how they do their food and their techniques. You learn, you learn every single day. And there's another after culture who's an amazing chef in London. He taught me how to plate. You know how if you want to plate, you need to plate this way. I think you learn, you kind of become, you know, every single day if you learn, you're gonna learn how to do it. I think that's a great point to make that. I know that we're in an incredibly tumultuous and really terrifying time and that the industry has these fundamental problems that are creating inequities and discrimination. But this is also the industry that you can walk into a restaurant with no skills and start from the very bottom and work side by side with people from 58 different countries and people who speak different languages and feel welcome, right? Like I think that's something really special about the world you work in. I think sharing food, you know, it breaks the barrier of the language. You put the food on the table, everybody will come together, no matter what language you speak. Food speaks the language, you know? For me, I really wanted to say something about Anthony Borden. I absolutely loved him. And he said once, said that I am an advocate for anything it is to be a move, walk in someone else's shoes or at least eat their food. It's all about exploring the world. Love in your heart and acting in your pocket, you can't go wrong. Yeah? I think that, I think that sure words have been spoken. I think, yeah, I think that without movement there's no cuisine, right? There's no food if people don't interact and share ideas and ingredients and move from place to place. You would never have opened a restaurant, right? Had you not moved. Do you think if you had stayed in India you would have gone into cooking? No, when I was doing after LA A-Levels I wanted to be in the hospitality industry and that's in no way, because you wouldn't exist because you wouldn't survive there. Still in India, the hospitality industry, we have a bunch of female chefs in India. Reality TV is changing it, but it's very much reality TV, you know? But the real chef women who work or men who work in the industry you can count on your fingers. Yeah, that's, I think it's a common story in this industry, right? Parents who don't want their kids to go into this because it's not, there's no guarantees and it's such a difficult thing, but you decided to do it anyway. What did your family think of you cooking your, the food that you grew up with and serving it to people in England? I think my dad and mom came and they were really, really proud of me and if I want to mourn, I mourn to Alan about something. I think him as my dad. And I just absolutely love him and I really want to say something about Dal Saladino. He's sitting somewhere as well. Dan, can't see him. Oh, there. Dan is a producer, editor from Radio 4 BBC and I bugged him as well, wrote to him and I had to prove to him that actually I can cook and I am good at it, what I do. And he gave me my first break on radio about a couple of years ago. So I present quite a lot on radio for now. So he is one of the guys who is very dear to me and helped me in my journey. Please big hand for him, please. What did these emails look like? What were you saying to them? Because I bug a lot of people and nobody responds when I'm like put me on the radio. What were you asking them? What was the opportunity that you were asking for? See, I didn't want it to be maybe I have more dreams. I had a dream. I came from a very small town in India and a small town girl can have a dream, yeah. So I came here and I opened a restaurant and I just didn't want it to be, that's it. I wanted more. I wanted a brown woman to be, you know, a mom. I have two teenage daughters and trust me, it's a really hard time at the moment. Teenagers, I was a teenager once and I phoned my mom and she said, well, grow out of it, you were worse. So, you know, so I have to live by that. I think I wanted more and I think because my husband is very supportive, he's supportive, Indian men, not many Indian men are very supportive. So he was very, he's very supportive and my daughters were very little when I opened. And you know, if you don't have the support of the family and friends, it's impossible to do what you want to do. And I wanted to kind of have that actually a woman who was a mom, who was a housewife can actually have a dream, can achieve these things. And that's why I wanted to be, you know, talked about, I wanted to write recipes that I grew up with. And Alan's told me once one thing, write every single day. I couldn't write, I wasn't a great writer at all. I write now. But he said write, even if you want to swear something, if you had a hard day at the restaurant, write every single day. That helps. Everybody, there's a writer in you. What do you write about every day? Is it like about what's happened or is, are you writing? But I'm so angry with some customers. You're just writing like Star Wars fan fiction and stuff like. I don't have time to watch TV. By the time I go back home, literally I'm a zombie sometimes, two o'clock. And then I have to get up at six o'clock for my kids to, I want to see my kids. I want to, that's the only time I see them in the morning. So I want to see them. I want to make the breakfast for them. This is all makeup, by the way. If I look like this, I've had two hours of sleep. So this is all makeup. And it's good quality makeup. This is also, there's no makeup over here. This is all beer. This is what you get. I think it's really interesting. There's this conversation or fallacy, I think that goes around that it's like, having a family is one of the reasons why women have to like depart the kitchen, right? My opinion is that having a child, having a family should be just as difficult for a male chef as it is for a female chef, right? Like why is it automatically the female chef's role to take care of the kids? Thank you. And you've done it a little bit differently than a lot of people. I don't think a lot of people had a family and then said, you know what? Like I'm gonna do one of the craziest things people can do and start cooking. At the age of 40, I did it. Right. And I mean, if that does prove like that is a fallacy, I don't think anything else will, right? Like you did it and I'm sure it was hard on the family, but like you said, like it's support and you have to have... I think you have to have support. You have to have the drive and you want to cook for people. You can't just stand and paint your nails and that's it. You want to cook. You want to be there for your chefs, right? You want to listen to somebody who's having a hard time at home or something. You want to be there for them because I think it's so, so important, I think. And I'm very... I look after my staff really well. I pay them well, I look after them. I think those are the very important things. You need to be able to listen to the people who work for you, care for you, were there for you, you know? What are the things from your experience that you want to make sure that your cooks and your staff are instilled with? If they're gonna go off and do something of their own, what do you want to make sure that they take with them to the next generation and the next restaurants and everything that's gonna come back to you in a lot of ways? See, I don't have any Indian or A Southeast Asian working in my restaurant, I'm not being racist, sorry. It's just that I cannot find any Indians working in there and I don't want to wait for somebody to come from India or Pakistan or Bangladesh to work in my restaurant. I want to train the younger generation we have in UK because in the colleges, they're not trained properly. So, want them to train because we eat different kinds of cuisines, why not train them from basics? So, I train every, you know, my kitchen porter, she was amazing, amazing, amazing, and I taught her how to cook. She can make kilannans and she cooks all for me and then I had, you know, a lady who's just left me, I was devastated because she wanted to move to near her parents, she was from Poland, but she could cook exactly the way I wanted her to cook and he couldn't make different between my curry and her curry, you know? That is it. I think that's really amazing because, you know, I say she goes to open a restaurant, I think she's gonna wrestle with these questions of, well, what are you doing cooking this food? It's not yours, but you're sharing it, right? It's culture is a shared thing and misappropriation is a terrible thing, but it's also, we can't put up all these walls between you're not from where I am, you can't cook my food, right? It's just stupidity, I just think, you know? Why, but at the same time, I'll tell you, respect the food of that country. Please. You know, if you cannot respect the food of my country, please don't cook it. I mean, that was a great way for us to end, but do you got anything else you wanna say to the folks here? No, I'm glad to Molina and, where is Rene, to invite me here and give me this opportunity. I was crazy within these things, you know, it happened and I'm really looking forward to listen to the other speakers here. I'm thanking all the crowd here. It's been an honor to talk to you. Thank you so much. Thank you.