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 at her restaurant 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. 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 games with children from the slums. ‘People would see me playing on the streets, they thought it was scandalous,’ she laughs. ‘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 relatively normal household. Her mother ran a food business, and Asma spent hours watching her and the household cooks prepare the dishes she would eventually make famous in her own right. ‘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 married and moved 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. ‘I had never eaten alone before in my life,’ she adds. ‘It was very lonely.’

Determined to reconnect with home through food, Asma returned to India for several months to learn the royal Mughlai dishes of her childhood from the household cooks, her mother and mother-in-law. Back in Britain, she went on to have two children, qualify as a lawyer and complete a doctorate in British Constitutional Law at King's College London. ‘My father still calls me "Doctor Asma",’ she laughs.

Despite her academic achievements, Asma 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.

She began inviting friends, many of them immigrant nannies and housewives she had met through her children's school, to eat at her home. The dinners grew into supper clubs, and word of Asma's home-cooked Mughlai feasts spread. Indian chef Vivek Singh was so impressed after attending one that he invited her to host a lunch at The Cinnamon Club in Westminster.

However, her family struggled to accept that she had abandoned a career in law to become 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.’

Eventually, her children revealed what was happening and the supper clubs came to an end. With nowhere to continue her mission, Asma was offered a residency at the Sun and 13 Cantons in Soho. Darjeeling Express, as it was now called, had barely been open a month when restaurant critic Fay Maschler arrived for lunch and published a glowing review.

The restaurant was packed for the next nine months. Many of Asma's friends, the same Indian nannies and housewives who had attended her earliest supper clubs, were now working alongside her in the kitchen. They were the lonely trees, stripped and hollow, that she had seen years before – now empowered and recognised for their talents.

‘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.’

When the residency ended, Asma was prepared to return home until one of her regular customers, Simon Quayle, then executive director of Shaftesbury, offered her the chance to compete for a permanent site at Kingly Court in Soho.

‘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.’

Darjeeling Express opened in Kingly Court in 2017, bringing Asma's home-style Indian cooking to a wider audience. The restaurant's success eventually prompted a move to a larger site in Covent Garden in 2020, before returning to Kingly Court in 2023.

Through each move, the food and philosophy remained unchanged. Asma's all-female kitchen, many of whom are immigrants and second daughters like herself, continued to cook and serve the dishes of their childhoods with warmth and generosity.

‘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. Rich, slow-cooked Bengali goat kosha and delicate prawn malaikari are recipes inherited from her mother, with every dish carrying a story Asma is more than happy to share.

In 2026, Darjeeling Express entered another chapter, moving to a larger, two-storey restaurant on Rupert Street, near Chinatown. With a spacious dining room and open kitchen, the new site continues Asma's commitment to placing the women behind her food at the centre of the experience.

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 telling women everywhere that their skills are worth celebrating.

In 2019, she became the first British chef to feature on Netflix's Chef's Table, using the international exposure to advocate for greater representation in professional kitchens.

‘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.’

Her influence has only continued to grow. In 2024, Asma was named one of TIME magazine's 100 most influential people, recognising her achievements as both a chef and an advocate for women. She has also published several cookbooks, including Asma's Indian Kitchen, Ammu and Monsoon, the latter released in 2025 and celebrating the flavours and seasons of her native Bengal.

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, unstoppable in her mission to lift up the 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.’