A tour of the kingdom

Ranjit Mathrani and Namita and Camellia Panjabi run iconic London restaurants. Can they save Veeraswamy?

- VIR SANGHVI

There are, wrote F Scott Fitzgerald, no second acts in American lives. I was reminded of this and about how it clearly did not apply to Indian lives when I had lunch recently with Ranjit Mathrani at Amaya, one of the many successful restaurants he runs in London.

Mathrani has had many acts in his distinguished career. After he got his degree in Physics and Mechanical Engineering at Cambridge, he decided not to come back to India, joined the British civil service and then moved to the City of London, where he became the first person of Indian origin to become a director of a merchant bank.

That's a distinguished resume to begin with. But everything changed when he met Namita Panjabi on a visit to Mumbai. They married and Namita moved to London, a city she already knew well. Namita was in fashion when they married (her background is also Cambridge, followed by management consulting before she went into international fashion) and continued with that in London until Ranjit had an idea.

They were both interested in food and Camellia, Namita's sister, was already a legend at the Taj group in India. So, why not start a high-end Indian restaurant?

A British friend who was in the restaurant business advised them on how to begin. Other friends chipped in with suggestions. Namita wanted to call the restaurant Indian Summer, but the author Gita Mehta suggested Chutney Mary and the Mathranis liked the name.

For all that, says Ranjit now, they made many mistakes. One of them was choosing a site on the wrong side of the King's Road. (“We heard King's Road and thought that was it! We really knew nothing!” Ranjit laughs now.)

When Chutney Mary, with a menu that included Anglo-Indian dishes, opened, Namita was at the restaurant every day. But, with that location, and the British prejudice against paying relatively high prices for Indian food in the 1990s, the customers never came.