50 Great Curries of India

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We were interested,” says Namita. “We talked to chefs who were incredibly knowledgeable about the food of their region. We grew up being able to explain the difference between Jaipur lamb and Jabalpur lamb."

The 2005 Tatler Restaurant Awards recognised the trio's ground-breaking work by selecting it for the Restaurateur of the Year award - the first time it has gone to purveyors of non-European cuisine. Bloomberg): Everyone seems to be giving up something for January. Even I am not drinking, though my diet doesn’t extend to a meat-free month. Add half the tamarind water (I still haven’t figured out what you’re supposed to do with the other half), the jaggery, curry and coriander leaves and about 1½ teaspoons of salt. Chefs need direction,” explains Camellia. “You can’t cook the same food you’d cook at a Bengali family home in a London restaurant. The presentation needs to change, the amount of oil needs to be reduced and you can’t cook the meat right through.”

Chutney Mary’s second phase

The recipe serves four. As usual, I ate it all myself, with only a marginal downsizing of the ingredients. So, is it time to stop, job well done? There’s still stuff to learn, Camellia insists, there are still conventions to rattle. She approves of the Japanese principle of kaizen, the power of continuous, small-step improvements.‘And there’s a phrase in Gujarati – avay sun. It means ‘what next?’ or ‘now what?’. It’s about moving forward. Every time I meet the team and discuss things with them, I end with "avay sun?".’ The one dish that is believed to be Indian and drunk all over India is Masala Chai, which we have recently imported into this country as a delicacy. But there was no tea in India, it was introduced by the British after a dispute with the Chinese authorities,” she said, highlighting the two-way culinary exchanges. But how did she develop such an obsession with food? "My mother loves food, but it was my grandmother who really taught me to cook. The whole family would talk of food and ingredients - what we were eating that day - constantly."

They are responsible for devising for the restaurant and food concepts. Camellia refines the food offer and handles marketing and PR, while Namita fine-tunes the food presentation, décor (which features stylish Indian folk art) and kitchen management. You have to remember that at that time there was no Indian restaurant in the world that was seeking to be contemporary,” adds Mathrani. “The 2001 changes coincided with Camellia officially joining the business. We made the experience far more sophisticated.”

The early days of the business

Karan Johar reveals only 18 people were invited to Aditya Chopra and Rani Mukerji’s secret wedding: ‘I had to lie to my mother’ years is a milestone that vanishingly few restaurants mange to hit. The trio put Chutney Mary’s longevity down to its willingness to evolve. “The emphasis on great food never changes,” says Camellia. “But great food is not stationary. What is great today can be dated tomorrow. We’re continually reinventing.” Camellia, who had been involved from the start, came on board full-time in 2001 when the group opened its first Masala Zone in Soho, followed by a second in Islington. Born in Mumbai, Camellia read Economics at Cambridge and went on to become the Marketing Director of Taj Hotels, India's most prestigious hotel group. With a lifelong passion for food, Camellia helped create several restaurants for these premier hotels, featuring little-known regional dishes. In 1982 she set up the Bombay Brasserie in London, serving straightforward Indian dishes, such as aloo tuk (potatoes with yogurt and tamarind), and paneer goli kebabs (cottage cheese and potato balls with pomegranate and fig chutney). In 1992 the restaurant served its millionth customer.

If Camellia is a grand dame of Indian fine dining, she is remarkably unstuffy, saying it is fine to use some bottled ingredients (e.g. ginger and garlic) if you are in a hurry. She didn’t even raise an eyebrow when I confessed to the pork. “Sounds almost Hawaiian,” she said. “But that is creative. It is something they might do in Assam. They cook a lot of pork.” She had far more influence over the culinary direction of each property than that title suggests, working with chefs to create new restaurants as the Taj Group converted some of the palaces she ate in as a child to upscale hotels. If using fresh prawns, wash and remove the veins. ( ¿Qué? It’s not a vein, it’s the intestinal tract.)You could say that our upbringing was Anglo Indian,” explains Namita. “Our schoolteachers were Scottish. We thought we were eating British food at school lunch, but it turned out they were Anglo Indian dishes. The first iteration of Chutney Mary was largely based on the food of our childhood. We wanted to preserve it, it felt like it was fading away.” Most critical to the character of the final dish is the masala, the spice paste which forms the base of the sauce. There are some ingredients common to all the recipes I try – garlic, turmeric, red chillies, coriander seeds – and some more esoteric additions. Vivek Singh includes star anise for example, a spice more typical of points further east but which, according to Madhur Jaffrey, is a legacy of Goa's trading past, and I love the slightly mentholated character it give his sauce. He also uses cloves, which add a deep sweetness to the dish. Best with white rice and accompanied bya green vegetable such as potatoes with spinach or fenugreek.) We'd research local dishes. It’s important to bear in mind that there were very few restaurants and hotels in India at that point," says Camellia. "We were talking to former palace chefs and going into people's homes."

Masala World served more than 500,000 customers in 2005, and Mathrani expects this to rise more than one million in a couple of years with the expansion of Masala Zone.The food was both original and well-executed. “At the time it was unheard of for Indian restaurants not to use freezers,” says Camellia. “We banned them in our kitchen. The chefs would come in every day and start from scratch. This made a huge difference to the quality. We also used a much better class of produce than any other Indian restaurant.” As card-carrying members of the Indian elite, the pair travelled the subcontinent with their parents visiting maharajas in their palaces and experiencing regional specialities at their best. This is down to down to their privileged upbringing in Indian in the 50s and 60s – Namita says they are midnight’s children, a reference to Salman Rushdie famed book about India’s transition from British colonialism to independence. The sisters are sanguine about why they work together so well as sisters, as Namita sees it, ‘We have very different strengths which dovetail well. Besides being a brilliant cook, Camellia [author of 50 Great Curries of India] is very good at taking a helicopter view, being intuitive and looking ahead, predicting trends. Whereas I am much better at setting style and thinking about the detail and presentation of dishes and the interior. We talk food all the time. Of course, we argue and disagree, yet we laugh a lot too. I couldn’t imagine working any other way.’