Chutney Mary, Veeraswamy

Namita Panjabi, one time merchant banker, now fulltime restaurateur (Chutney Mary and Veeraswamy, London's India portals) was in Bombay, and she invited me to lunch at sister Camellia's residence. Camellia was at the hotel, so I sat with Namita and her mother in a large morning room with glass walls, looking out at the Bay of Bombay. The lunch was prepared by a Rajasthani cook, Namita was trying him out for one of her restaurants, and I realised I was the afternoon's guinea pig. The cook had replied to an advertisement and he had been called to cook and serve the lunch, as corporate a job interview as there may be.

That is how Namita Panjabi picks her kitchen staff. She tries them out from local (I should say national) talent, selects, and flies them over to London, lodges them in rooms with baths in Chelsea. Others import food ingredients from India, Ms. Panjabi imports the chefs, wholesale, that is why she provides the most authentic Indian food in London, and food that ranges over several regions. In a country with 9,000 curry houses, and the numbers growing by the day, Chutney Mary and Veeraswamy stand out. They have been in the Good Curry Guide, and one of them, I forget which, is the current holder of The Best Indian Restaurant In UK award.

Chutney Mary has been a success since the day it opened in 1990. The normal system is to take over somebody's running restaurant, renovate it and run it, banking on the goodwill of the old restaurant. But goodwill costs millions of pounds, according to Namita. So they opened a brand new restaurant in Chelsea, a nice residential area but not a restaurant destination, and began from scratch. It has Anglo-Indian paintings on the walls (perhaps that is the derivative for the name), 130 covers, including a garden conservatory at courtyard level, walled all round by glass. The service is plated, it is best for Indian food.

Till the Chutney Mary came along, Indian food in England was largely Punjabi. The kitchens had three pots, one carried a makhni sauce, another a brown onion sauce and the third a white almond gravy. Whatever the order, the appropriate gravy was added to it and served. First, she introduced food from all regions, or most regions, Goa, Hyderabad, Kerala, Chettinad, Delhi, with a chef for each region. And if a particular chef was absent, that region's food was not on the menu on that day. And she changed the three pot philosophy. If there were 22 curries on the menu, there were 22 pots bubbling away in the kitchen.

Veeraswamy is a comparatively new acquisition, though the restaurant itself is registered as the oldest Indian restaurant in England. It stands at the end of Regent Street, very near Piccadilly, and has a kind of British Empire history that Englishmen love to hear and get sentimental over. Edward Palmer, an Anglo-Indian, whose great-grandfather was principal secretary to Warren Hastings and great-grandmother an Indian princess, went to see India when he was 20 years old, returned the following year (1926) and started Veeraswamy.

In the old days, its customers ranged from the Maharaja of Baroda to the King of Denmark (duck vindaloo and Carlsberg beer), Pandit Nehru ate there, Krishna Menon, and it was customary for Indians visiting London to spend the first day in town resting and the second day dining at Veeraswamy. Since then, the restaurant had changed hands two or three times and was a little down in the dumps. That's when Namita Panjabi and Ranjit Mathrani bought it over -- a mistake, said the English restaurant critics. Not so, the new owners gave the place lacquered walls, vibrant colours of Kanjeeveram silk saris, orange, mustard gold, emerald green, purple, South Indian artefacts set against hand-blasted glass, a collection of Kerala locks.

Best of all, it has a collection of wines in a huge wine display. And the wines have been helpfully sorted out to go with Indian food. A White Vina Porta Chardonnay from Chile, with flavour, fruit and character, to go with the medium spiced dishes, and full flavoured Red Roolberg Winery Pinotage from South Africa to accompany the spiciest (the Manglorean kori gassi, the chicken done in roasted spices, for instance). A very impressive and exhaustive list. More original are some of the individual cocktails, a mango daiquiri (white, lime juice and mango pulp), and a masala bloody mary - the masala is in the tomato juice.

I also enjoy the manner in which some of the starters are described. Steamed rice cakes and spicy lentil curry is idli sambar, and puffed crispy wheat biscuits with lentil, potato and a chilled tangy tamarind cocktail, is pani puri. The food is more or less common to both the restaurants, four to five dishes per region and each with its individual chef. A white biryani from Hyderabad, the sofiani biryani, the chicken cooked along with the Basmati rice, with cardamoms, poppy seeds, almonds, cheeranji, white pepper, delicately flavoured but with its own pungency.

It is eaten with Hyderabad's tomato ka kut. And shanks of English lamb cooked in an intense aromatic curry, of bone stock and spices - an Avadhi rogan josh. There is another shank of lamb, a signature dish of the restaurant, slow roasted in a robust blend of the xacuti masala. There are lobster and clam delicacies with curry leaves and ginger; a lobster samoosa, the Bohri samoosa, with lobster meat packed in it, for a starter, and crab cakes served with green chutney.

I may mention a seafood moilee, the delicately flavoured curry from Kerala, with fresh flaked crab, mussels, prawns, calamari and salmon. And you are always assured a fresh seabass in a red Goa masala. And some select desserts, recommended: A banana kulfi with bitter chocolate, gulab jamuns flambed in brandy, and mawa samoosas with vanilla ice-cream. Small wonder London's become the food capital of the world.