Romy Gill's Pem opens with regional Indian menu

Romy Gill's Pem opens today at Conrad London St James, the chef's first permanent restaurant in six years and a full pivot from the suffragette-themed kitchen Sally Abé left in March 2025.

Gill takes over the address at 22-28 Broadway, Westminster, and renames the venture Romy Gill's Pem, swapping Abé's modern European menu for regional Indian cooking. The room keeps its name — a nod to suffragette Emily Wilding Davison, known to friends as "Pem" — from the original restaurant Abé opened there in July 2021 with an all-female senior kitchen team.

Inside Romy Gill's Pem menu

A suffragette dining room turns into a spice route through four Indian regions.

The menu, called Neemat — Hindi for blessing or bounty — moves through Punjab, Bengal, Kerala and Rajasthan. Early dishes include samosa chaat, hand-dived scallops with raw mango and date-tamarind, tandoori quail, and a slow-braised lamb gosht with Kashmiri morels. Set lunch runs £35 for two courses, and the à la carte list runs at half price through 30 September to bring diners in early.

"This feels like a pivotal moment because it marks the beginning of a fresh creative chapter and, in many ways, a second innings for me," Gill told The Sybarite ahead of the launch. "The samosa chaat is very special to me because it is inspired by the street food I grew up eating."

A six-year break from restaurants

Gill closed Romy's Kitchen in Thornbury, South Gloucestershire, in 2019 after six years, and has not run a restaurant kitchen since. She was appointed MBE for services to hospitality in 2016, has published three cookbooks — Zaika, On the Himalayan Trail and India: Recipes from Home — and has cooked at the James Beard Foundation in New York.

The Pem built its reputation on Abé's all-female senior team and a menu tied to the suffragette movement, a few hundred metres from Parliament. She left the hotel in March 2025, and Conrad spent months on a replacement before settling on Gill's regional Indian menu for Romy Gill's Pem.

"For me, food is still about bringing people together and creating wonderful memories," Gill said of the sharing format built into the menu, with dishes meant to be ordered generously and passed around rather than plated for one. Cocktails built on Indian spices and single-estate teas from Himachal Pradesh round out the drinks list.

The discount at Romy Gill's Pem runs through the end of September, giving diners a month to test the menu before full prices apply. The opening lands in a crowded month for London — Public House Group opened The Horses in Clerkenwell this week — and Conrad has not said whether "Pem" survives once Gill's residency ends.