Romy Gill takes over The Pem in London this autumn

Romy Gill takes over the kitchen at The Pem this autumn, reopening the restaurant inside the Conrad London St James with a menu built around the regional cooking of Punjab, Bengal, Kerala and Rajasthan.

Gill succeeds Sally Abé, who led The Pem from its opening in July 2021 until March 2025 and also worked as consultant chef across the wider hotel. Gill's brief is narrower: she runs only the restaurant, not the hotel's other kitchens.

The room sat without a named chef for more than a year after Abé's departure. Gill's arrival ends that gap and marks her first restaurant kitchen in six years, since she closed Romy's Kitchen, her Punjabi-Bengali restaurant near Bristol, in 2019.

I want the Pem to feel lively, the kind of restaurant where people stay longer than they planned.

A return after six years away

Gill is one of Britain's best-known Indian chefs, the author of three cookbooks and an MBE recipient for services to hospitality. Her most recent book, Romy Gill's India: Recipes from Home, traces her Punjabi and Bengali roots across the country's regional kitchens, the same territory she is bringing to St James's.

"I want the Pem to feel lively and full of energy, the kind of restaurant where people stay longer than they planned," Gill said of the relaunch.

The menu draws on her travels across India rather than a single regional repertoire: rich curries, smoky grills and slow-braised dishes from Punjab, Bengal, Kerala and Rajasthan, framed by Gill as a tribute to the women who taught her to cook. A tasting menu is still being finalised, and no prices had been published at the time of writing.

What changes at St James's

Conrad London St James general manager Bernadette Gilligan said the restaurant has "always evolved through the people leading it, and each chapter has brought something different."

The shift is also a change of register for the address. Abé built her version of the Pem around modern British cooking; Gill's regional Indian menu points the room somewhere else entirely, closer to the food she grew up eating than to any pan-Indian formula served for a hotel crowd.

Adam Nevin's return to Glovers Alley in Dublin follows a similar pattern this year, a named chef reviving a kitchen that had gone quiet. Tom Sellers took on five kitchens at Stoke Park under the same kind of single-chef mandate.

Bookings open once the tasting menu and prices are confirmed, with the reopening set for this autumn.