After Six Years Away From a Permanent Kitchen, Romy Gill Is Rewriting The Pem
The West Bengal-born chef returns this autumn to Conrad London St. James with Punjab, Bengal, Kerala, and Rajasthan on a suffragette-named room.
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Romy Gill MBE is heading back into a permanent restaurant kitchen for the first time in six years. This autumn, The Pem at Conrad London St. James in Westminster reopens as Romy Gill at The Pem, swapping the modern British brief that launched under Sally Abé in 2021 for regional Indian cooking. Harper’s Bazaar India sat with Gill on July 28, 2026, as she framed the move as a chapter in a room already named for courage: Emily Wilding Davison, the suffragette whose family called her Pem.
Gill grew up in West Bengal, ran Romy’s Kitchen in Thornbury, Gloucestershire, until 2019, and spent the years after on books, television, travel, and guest kitchens, including earlier collaborations with Abé in The Pem Presents series. She holds an MBE for services to hospitality (2016) and has published three cookbooks: Zaika, On the Himalayan Trail, and India: Recipes from Home. The Caterer and the restaurant’s own site put the autumn menu around Punjab, Bengal, Kerala, and Rajasthan: rich curries, smoky grills, slow braises, sharing plates, and a tasting menu still being finalised.
What she keeps returning to in interviews is regional range without the one-note “Indian restaurant” script. In Harper’s Bazaar she talks about British produce cooked with Indian technique, authenticity as knowing a dish’s place and craft rather than freezing a recipe in time, and a room she wants elegant without stiffness. Comfort food, she says, is still dal, roti, rice, sabzi, and achar; cheese on toast sits beside that as a hospitality-career memory. Abé left The Pem in March 2025 after leading an all-female senior team at launch; hotel GM Bernadette Gilligan has said each chef chapter shifts the room, and that Gill takes it somewhere new.
For diners watching London’s Indian fine-dining map, the useful timing note is that this is an appointment and reopen story, not a review of a room already serving. Square Meal lists a September 2026 target; confirm the exact date, hours, and menu on Romy Gill at The Pem before you book. The address is Conrad London St. James, 22-28 Broadway, Westminster SW1H 0BH.