Asma Khan
Asma Khan
Owner of Darjeeling Express and star of Netflix’s Chef’s Table, Asma Khan is one of the UK's most prominent female chefs and an unstoppable force for social change in the food industry.
One of the brightest stars of London's restaurant scene, Asma Khan stands tall as an inspirational figure in food, astounding diners with sumptuous Indian cookery from her own Darjeeling Express and relentlessly pushing the boundaries as an advocate for social change. But things were not always so easy – Asma’s journey to the top has had its fair share of twists and turns.
Asma was born the second daughter of a royal Indian family – something that comes with somewhat of a stigma in India. Daughters are often seen as a burden, particularly for families that cannot afford to pay for them to marry, and second daughters even more so. ‘A first born girl is sad – a second girl is a disaster,’ she says in a short documentary she made with the BBC in 2017. ‘I don’t think there was a lot of joy at my birth, because I was a second daughter.’
Instead of being shackled by her birthright, Asma has made a habit of rejecting the expectations surrounding her, redefining what it means to be a second daughter, a woman and a Muslim immigrant in Britain. Even at fourteen years old – an age when her royal siblings and cousins were preparing arranged marriages – she was out playing cricket on the streets of Kolkata, organising pickup games with children from the slums. ‘People would see me playing on the streets, they thought it was scandalous,’ she laughs. ‘Most girls get married at eighteen, but I didn’t. It’s funny because it wasn’t so much the boys, it was the mothers who didn’t like me! I wouldn’t take any nonsense and I loved playing cricket, so they thought I was trouble.’
Though her parents came from two separate royal families, she grew up in a very normal household. Her parents both worked – her mother ran a food business and Asma would spend hours in the kitchen helping her and household cooks assemble and serve the dishes that she would eventually come to make famous in her own right – authentic royal Mughlai cuisine that reflected her parents heritage. ‘My father is a Muslim Rajput, descended from a warrior tribe, and my mother is a Muslim Bengali,’ she explains. ‘It’s rare in India for people to marry outside of their own region, but it has been a huge, huge benefit to me, because I inherited the culture and tradition of two powerful styles of cuisine.’
Although Asma loved food, she left home without ever learning to cook. When she did eventually marry and move to Cambridge to join her husband in 1991, she couldn’t even boil an egg. Separated from home and unable to recreate the food she loved and missed, she felt isolated and alone. ‘I was so unhappy,’ she says. ‘I’d seen pictures in books of trees with no leaves, but it wasn’t until I came to the UK that I saw one in the flesh. The sensation of holding a tree – and you could feel it was stripped and hollow – that’s how I felt. The place I’d left behind was so abundant, so loving and warm, and suddenly I’d moved to this cold country in winter with a person I didn’t really know.’ Her husband – a graduate tutor at the time – was rarely home for meals, leaving Asma to fend for herself. ‘I had never eaten alone before in my life,’ she adds. ‘It was very lonely.’
Asma resolved that she would learn how to cook. She returned to India for a few months and busied herself in the kitchens of her home, where she learnt to craft the royal Mughlai dishes of her childhood from the household cooks, as well as from her mother and mother-in-law. When she returned to the UK, Asma continued to reject her second daughter stigma – she had two children, became the first woman in her family to attend college, qualified as a lawyer and completed a doctorate in British Constitutional Law at King’s College, London. ‘My father still calls me ‘Doctor Asma’,’ she laughs.
Despite studying so intensively for her PhD, Asma always knew her future belonged in food. ‘I wanted to feed other people who I knew were going through the same thing I had been through,’ she says. The journey started in her own home, where she would invite friends – nannies and housewives she had met at her children’s school who were also immigrants – to come and eat with her. The dinner parties became supper clubs and word of mouth spread like wildfire – Asma became legendary for her home-cooked Mughlai dinners. She received an immediate seal of approval from some of the best Indian chefs in the country too – Vivek Singh came for dinner one evening and promptly invited her to host a lunch at his restaurant The Cinnamon Club in Westminster.
Despite this success, Asma's family struggled to accept that she had abandoned a career in law to be a cook. ‘I used to hold the supper clubs behind my husband’s back,’ she says. ‘He always suspected it. Every time he travelled, I did a supper club.’ Asma could keep the dinners under wraps from her family, but not from her children – ‘they didn’t like strangers being in the house,’ she says. Eventually they blew the whistle and her family put a stop to the supper clubs. With nowhere to go to continue her mission, Asma was offered a residency at the Sun and 13 Cantons in Soho. ‘I couldn't see how my food fitted there, but I had no other options,’ she says. Darjeeling Express – as it was now called – had barely been open a month when Fay Maschler arrived for lunch and wrote a glistening review that launched Asma’s name into the stratosphere.
The restaurant was packed for the next nine months. Many of Asma’s friends – the Indian nannies and housewives that she had invited to her very first supper club – now worked with her in the kitchen. They were the lonely trees, stripped and hollow, that she had seen years before – now they were empowered, recognised for their talents and released from their shackles as second daughters. ‘They're great cooks, but no one ever acknowledged or appreciated that – it’s something that really bothers me,’ says Asma. ‘We dishonour generations of women by making them feel like all they did was cook.’
After Asma's residency was up, she had resigned herself to shutting everything down and returning home to write geography revision notes for her son. That was until one of her regular customers, Simon Quayle, offered her a lifeline. As executive director of Shaftesbury and, in effect, landlord for a huge swathe of Chinatown and Soho, he offered Asma a site on the top floor of Kingly Court. The catch? She would have to compete with fifty-five other prospective businesses to get it. ‘I’d never written a business plan, never given a PowerPoint presentation,’ Asma explains. ‘So, we played to our strengths. The day of our meeting, we made hundreds and hundreds of samosas and we fed the whole building for lunch. And we won the lease.’
The rest, as they say, is history. Darjeeling Express may be bigger and grander than when it was a supper club (it even moved to a larger site in Covent Garden after a few years at Kingly Court in Soho), but the food and philosophy hasn't changed. Asma’s brigade is still made up entirely of women – many of whom are second daughters and immigrants – who cook and serve Asma’s dishes with warmth and love. ‘We all cook with the desire to embrace someone,’ she says. ‘We’re not cooking to make money. We’re cooking because we all know what it is to be without family, without the comfort of having your own food.’
The dishes of Asma’s royal ancestry are not about lavish ingredients – they are about feeding. The rich melt-in-the-mouth curries – slow-cooked Bengali goat kosha and delicate prawn malaikari – are recipes inherited from her mother. Every dish has a story behind it; one that Asma is more than happy to share when she brings your meal to the table.
As well as creating a place for incredible Indian food, Asma has made Darjeeling Express into much more than a restaurant. It’s a platform for social change – a neon billboard to tell women everywhere that their skills are worth celebrating. Asma is the first British chef to ever be featured on Netflix's Chef's Table, and she used her exposure to the fullest. ‘I want to talk about race and about the absolute imbalance of female representation in kitchens. I want to leave a powerful ripple so people will see that it’s possible for them to succeed too, no matter how inferior they are made to feel.’
Food isn’t the only thing Asma has inherited from her parents – her father’s warrior blood shines through in everything she does. She’s a force of nature – gregarious, sure, but also unstoppable in her mission to lift up women around her. ‘These women are my tribe now,’ she says. ‘I will only win when everybody wins. Don’t put us in boxes. Don’t draw lines around us. Don’t tell us who we are. We will be anything we want to be.’
Three things you should know
Filming for Asma's episode of Chef's Table took twenty days – ten in India, and ten in the UK.
All the food at Darjeeling Express is cooked fresh on the day – the only thing in the freezer at Darjeeling Express is Häagen-Dazs cookies and cream ice cream.
Asma's debut cookbook Asma's Indian Kitchen won the World Gourmand prize for best Indian cookbook in 2018.
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