Camellia Panjabi was born in Bombay, and studied economics at Cambridge University U.K..  She joined as a Management Trainee at Unilever London, and then as a member of the Tata Administrative service in Bombay.  Tata being the largest industrial conglomerate in India.

She was assigned by Tatas to be the first Sales and Marketing Manager of the Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay in 1969 – when it was adding a new tower and doubling its capacity.

She was part of the team that set up 5 new restaurants at the Taj, which became legendary over time.

In a career with the Taj Group spanning 30 years, the Taj grew from one hotel with 240 room keys to one with 70 hotels and over 7,000 rooms by the year 2000.  Many of the hotels that the Taj opened virtually created the destinations they were in.  These included the Lake Palace- Udaipur, the Rambagh Palace-Jaipur, The Fort Aguada-Goa and so on.  It was the pioneering hotels in cities like Madras, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Lucknow and in Kerala that Camellia spearheaded the creation of regional Indian restaurants.

She is credited in India for introducing Szechwan and Thai cuisine to the sub-continent.  She persuaded the Taj to making its first Chinese restaurant in 1971 as a Szechwan one and brought in the Chefs and Managers for that.  From the 1980’s she set up in Taj hotels several Thai restaurants in Bangalore, Goa, Bombay and Cochin, accompanied by Thai herbal gardens because Thai herbs were not available in India.  India is now dominated by Szechwan cuisine among all Chinese cuisines and Thai has also naturally become popular.

She introduced the first Italian coffee shop in a hotel in India – called Trattoria at the Taj President in Bombay, which remains Bombay’s favourite Italian eatery.

She set up the Bombay Brasserie for the Taj Group in 1982, which continues to be a landmark Indian restaurant in London, because it changed the way Indian food was viewed till then.

In 2001, Camellia left the Taj and joined her family restaurant business in London.
She re-launched Chutney Mary, which was named the best Indian restaurant in London in 2004 at the Tio Pepe ITV Restaurant Awards.  In 2005, their restaurant Amaya was voted the Best Restaurant in London. 
She is currently working on the renovation of Veeraswamy in London, which is the world’s oldest surviving Indian restaurant, which will be 80 years old in 2006.

Camellia is author of a book on the “50 Great Curries of India”, which has sold over half a million copies world wide.