Meet Romy Gill, new star of the rebooted ‘Ready Steady Cook’
As the old favourite returns to the BBC with a fresh format, Eleanor Steafel talks to star Romy Gill
It used to be the perfect afterschool fodder. Half an hour of pure nonsense TV, where two chefs battled it out to turn random ingredients into something edible in under 20 minutes, while a gladiatorial audience decided their fate with cards emblazoned with either a green pepper or a red tomato (you can hear the dulcet tones of Ainsley Harriott now, can’t you?). This was a warm bath of a food programme, from a bygone era when a television chef could legitimately spend 20 minutes making a bacon sandwich and serve it to rapturous applause.
The recipes were often strange, rarely appetising. One memorable Ready Steady Cook dessert was dubbed a “baked Alaska”, but its two chief ingredients were a pat of garlic and herb Boursin and an orange. And who could forget Brian Turner’s signature “Mr Carrot” – quite simply a whole boiled carrot, atop a mound of puréed carrot.
In a bold move, then, the BBC has brought it back. A “brand new” Ready Steady Cook is set to launch next week, in the same slot it always occupied – weekdays at 4.30pm. Harriott isn’t part of the reboot. Instead, Rylan Clark-neal steers the ship while five new chefs – Romy Gill, Akis Petretzikis, Mike Reid, Anna Haugh and Ellis Barrie – battle it out in a format that has barely been tinkered with, 10 years on. Terrible puns abound, as do endless odd concoctions and wild card ingredients from the tinned food aisle. Masala spaghetti hoops, anyone?
You would be forgiven for wondering how on earth the oldfashioned format could find a place on the schedules when even Bake Off is fighting for viewers. But actually, I wonder if it might provide just the kind of wholesome, awkward charm we could all do with in our lives? One of the standout stars is Indian chef Romy Gill, who manages to turn a tin of potatoes into something miraculous with her pantry of spices.
This time around, various dietary requirements pose as much of a challenge for the contestants as the limited bag of ingredients. “We have to cater for everybody – vegetarians, vegans, people with intolerances,” says Gill. “The produce that we’re getting is very sustainable and eco-friendly. We don’t have plastic carrier bags, either.”
Gill, 47, a food writer and chef whose Bristol restaurant shut down last year, wrote a bestselling vegan cookbook, but is refreshingly disparaging about this country’s relationship with plant-based meals. “I wrote a vegan cookbook because I was so fed up with [it being a] ‘trend’ in this country. I grew up eating plant-based food, but it wasn’t a trendy lifestyle choice. I fought with my publishers for six months to write that book, I was like: ‘Come on…’”
The Ready Steady Cook pantry is a rather different beast these days, she says. “There are more store cupboard ingredients like za’atar, rose harissa, and all the things I wanted in there, like fenugreek seeds, which 10 years ago you couldn’t find, but now I can actually get in my little local Tesco.”
For Gill, being invited on the show means a lot. “Sometimes, I just feel there is some karma. When I came to the UK, I used to watch Keith Floyd, the Two Fat Ladies and Ready Steady
Cook. I always said I wanted to go and sit in the audience. Now to be asked to be on it is just surreal for me.”
Growing up in West Bengal, she dreamt of one day appearing on the BBC. “We had a television, a big brown box. We were the first people on the street to get it. It would say: ‘This is the
‘I used to want to be in the audience – now I’ve been asked to be on it as a cook’
BBC’, and we would sit up. There was something really magical about those four words.”
Gill came to the UK in 1993 with her husband. They made a life together in Bristol and had two daughters. Missing her family and the food she grew up with, she tried to replicate the flavours and textures of her home cuisine with the strange new ingredients she found in mid-nineties England. Avocados were made into fresh chutneys, root vegetables into warming curries. In fact, she did exactly what she is now required to do on Ready Steady Cook
– turn a couple of disparate ingredients into something delicious.
Gill always knew she wanted to work in food, but opportunities didn’t come easy to an Indian mother of two. She began hosting dinner parties for friends, later running cookery classes, which led to her launching her own range of sauces, pickles, chutneys and spice mixes. She sold samosas and momos at markets and farm shops, and catered for parties.
But when she wanted to start her own restaurant, banks repeatedly turned her down for a loan. “They weren’t giving it to me,” she recalls as we chat over jasmine tea in a room at Broadcasting House. “I was brown, I was a woman, I had never opened a restaurant before. There were lots of things.” She eventually sold her jewellery to free up some cash to start Romy’s Kitchen, which for seven years had people travelling from all over the world to taste Gill’s British Indian food.
She has always battled for opportunities in an industry which can be cliquey, she says. “I think it’s really sad. As women, we should uplift women. In my journey, there have been more nice men who have helped me.”
For Gill, her chance to be a television chef came at just the right time. Last year, her mother passed away after a long battle with cancer, and the restaurant she had fought so hard to launch closed down. Struggling with grief, she found herself comfort-eating. “I ate at the wrong time of the night and I was really emotional-eating.” Now, she adheres to a semi-strict diet and is feeling more herself again.
In the midst of it all, her daughters and husband urged her to travel to India to be with her dad. They took a 10-day hike along the Himalayan trail, eating delicious food and processing their grief. “He’d lost his wife of 54 years and I’d lost Mum, so we’re grieving in two different ways.”
When she returned, the email arrived from the BBC inviting her to discuss being involved in a Ready Steady Cook reboot. “Last year was really up and down for me, with my Mum passing away, with my restaurant lease up. I said to my daughter ‘Can you just read that email to me?’ and she did, and said: ‘Mummy, they want to meet you!’”
It was her daughters Reet, 17, and Neev, 15, whom she also asked to read and reread the letter in 2016 notifying her that she was being made an MBE. “I rang them three times just to confirm it was for me, that they hadn’t made a mistake.”
Gill has had to battle through in an industry that hasn’t always been kind to her, but she says with this new show she might finally be able to enjoy the fruits of her labour. “I’m so proud that they’ve chosen me. Everybody was saying ‘are you ready for people recognising you’? I was like: ‘Yeah! Women of my age – why not?’ You have to enjoy the moment. I don’t take anything for granted.”