Chef and family who got caught up in ‘nightmare’
The family involved in the crash with Ant McPartlin are a top female chef and her restaurateur husband who say they have been through a ‘nightmare’.
Faheem Vanoo and his wife, chef Shilpa Dandekar, 36, were with their four-year-old daughter Amaira when their green Mini was in a collision with the TV presenter’s car.
The crash left the trio ‘shocked and dazed’ – but thankfully without any serious injuries.
‘The whole experience has just been a nightmare,’ Mr Vanoo told Mail Online. ‘It is not something that we ever expected, but we are just grateful that no one was hurt.
‘It has been a terrible experience and it feels like we are coming out of a nightmare. It has left us all a bit shaken up.’
Saying that he ‘ did not care’ that McPartlin was a millionaire, Mr Vanoo, 41, explained that he had been asked not to speak directly about the accident by police. But he stressed that ‘the main thing is that we are all safe’.
Asked if he had been contacted by McPartlin, he replied: ‘I cannot talk about that.’ Recalling the crash, Mr Vanoo said: ‘I hardly had time to react and turned in towards the kerb.’
After the accident, Amaira was taken to West Middlesex hospital in Isleworth, West London, by her parents for a check-up but was not kept in overnight for any treatment.
Mr Vanoo said: ‘She is fine. We are all okay.’ The family’s green Mini suffered damage to the nearside front wheel while the front nearside wheel of McPartlin’s £26,000 Mini was also thought to have been damaged.
McPartlin – who was thought to have been returning home from walking his dog in Richmond Park – was said to have become involved in the crash on a sharp bend after exiting a mini roundabout.
Mr Vanoo, who is originally from Mumbai, India, runs an Indian restaurant in Fulham called Pure Indian Cooking with his wife. Miss Dandekar trained at the Taj hotel group in India, before moving to the UK and cooking in various British pubs.
She has also worked as a sous chef in Quilon, Westminster, and was Raymond Blanc’s choice of head chef at London’s first Brasserie Blanc.
On Pure Indian Cooking’s website, the couple describe how they began their culinary careers in India. It says: ‘Since then, with Faheem managing front of house and Shilpa, who has worked with such masterchefs as the legendary Raymond Blanc OBe and Sriram Aylur of the Michelin-starred Quilon, heading the kitchen, the restaurant has amassed a strong following as a refined [and] exceedingly good local restaurant, with many clientele calling it a London “West end restaurant in Fulham!”’
earlier this year, Miss Dandekar was named as one of ‘five Indian women shaking up London’s food scene’.