Family comes first, says chef Anjum Anand

Nigella Lawson and Mary Berry may be our favourite TV chefs, but the ratio of men to women running restaurants will remain askew, says food writer Anjum Anand. “In the past, men ran a restaurant because it seemed like their job,” she said at the launch of her new range of chutneys and cookbook, Quick and Easy Indian, at Quo Vadis last night.

“Now we can do whatever we want but you see fewer women doing the Michelin star thing because we’ve got our priorities right: our families.” But the TV chef’s mother didn’t approve of her career immediately. “When I told [her] I was going to cook she said ‘are you kidding? You are educated, you can be anything!’ To her, generations of Indian women had been in the kitchen.”