An interview with Asma Khan

We chat to the founder of Darjeeling Express about appearing on Netflix’s Chef’s Table, battling sexism in the food industry and why she’s written a cookbook in homage to her mother.

When I ring Asma Khan, she’s been in a warehouse all day, making her way through signing copies of her new cookbook, Ammu. Yet the flurry of activity only seems to amplify the gusto with which she tackles every topic I throw at her.

Whether she’s slating misogyny in professional kitchens, dispelling myths about Indian food or explaining why she pays all her staff equally, Khan doesn’t hold back on her opinions. And she’s right not to. After speaking with her, I’m left with the feeling that if every chef was more like Asma Khan, the culinary world would be a much better place.

Asma's Zarda, a sweet rice dish served cooked with saffron and nuts (Image: Laura Edwards)

“I’m not trying to impress”

Despite being the first chef from Britain to feature in the award-winning Netflix documentary Chef’s Table back in 2019, Asma’s food ethos remains refreshingly down to earth.

This may have something to do with the way she started out. After working as a lawyer in London, Khan realised she longed for the foods of her childhood – despite having never learned to cook them herself. So she travelled back to Kolkata, India, to pick up some culinary skills from her mother.

“Because I had spent so much time in the kitchen as a child, I already knew how many of the dishes were made. I remember aromas, sounds and instructions from my mother. When I started cooking, all of that came flooding back.” 

 

 

 

 

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In 2012, after returning to London, she began running supper clubs out of her home. Word quickly spread about her sensational cooking and the gatherings became increasingly lively, with as many as 30 or 40 guests huddling into her flat.

“The atmosphere was exhilarating. People were thrilled to come to my house and eat and chat to the person next to them. They were all seated together at one long, communal table, there was a lot of conversation, lots of laughter.”

Asma's Ma's prawns recipe (Image: Laura Edwards)

READ MORE: Asma's recipe for tumeric, cumin and chilli prawns

The feeling of these legendary supper clubs prevails today at her restaurant, Darjeeling Express, which opened in Soho’s Kingly Court in 2018 (it has since moved to a larger location in Covent Garden). 

“You have to understand that this is not a pretentious place,” she stresses. “I'm not trying to impress you. I'm trying to heal and nourish you.”

“There’s no hierarchy”

Not one to do things by the book, Asma shunned hiring traditionally trained chefs in favour of an unconventional workforce: an all-female team of home cooks, hailing from all over the Indian subcontinent. 

Yet what these women lack in professional training, they more than make up for in experience, gained from decades of mastering family recipes. “I think the big thing is that they cook intuitively. Sometimes it’s very hard to get them to do anything! Because they are such well-established cooks themselves.”

“We don't batch-cook food or freeze and microwave anything, like many Indian restaurants do. We cook everything fresh.”

Asma's buttermilk chicken pakoras (Image: Laura Edwards)

READ MORE: Asma's recipe for buttermilk chicken pakoras

It seems Asma has taken every aspect of a traditional restaurant kitchen and turned it upside down. “There's no hierarchy,” she says. “I get paid the same rate as everybody else.”

“When you pay people decently, they take ownership of that work. They’re proud of it. They feel they’re investing in that business, in that restaurant, in that new recipe. There is a lot more emotion that goes into everything.”

Calling out sexism

While the number of female chefs in the UK is on the rise, just one in four chef roles are held by women, and senior positions are still disproportionately held by men. And sexism can be rife in the hospitality industry – something Asma is all too familiar with.

“When I was looking for a bigger site for my restaurant, before the pandemic hit, I was very unsuccessful. Not a single landlord showed me any places. And now I know this has to do with me being a woman.”

 

 

 

 

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“It had to take a pandemic, in fact, it had to take men to fail, for me to find such a big site for my restaurant.”

Misogyny in professional kitchens has even more far-reaching and sinister consequences than that. You only have to think back to the #MeToo scandal, which saw big-name chefs, including Mario Batali and The Spotted Pig’s Ken Friedman, being accused of sexual harassment.

Asma has a simple message for them: “Stop bullying women, stop harassing young girls. As a chef, you're working with fire, you're working with knives, so if you can’t deal with stress, you don't deserve to be in the kitchen.”

READ MORE: An interview with Rukmini Iyer

Reclaiming family dishes

I ask Asma about the misconceptions people have about Indian food. She instantly fires back: “Indian food! It's like saying ‘European food’. There are huge regional differences in India.”

“There's a massive north/south divide in terms of the kinds of basic techniques and flavours. Also, in some places they eat bread and in some places they eat rice. All the dishes that are eaten in that region are dependent on whether you're eating rice or bread.”

Asma's sikandari raan, or spiced leg of lamb (Image: Laura Edwards)

READ MORE: Asma's recipe for sikandari raan (spiced leg of lamb)

Rather than attempting to modernise traditional dishes, Asma’s keen to keep family recipes alive and celebrate their uniqueness.

“They are things I have grown up eating. I know the symbolism of each dish, why it’s made at a certain time – mostly due to seasonality, or some celebration or occasion. Understanding all of that, having a complete picture, makes the food that I cook stand out because it's very personal.”

Ammu

“I always knew that my mother was a very pivotal character in my life,” Asma says. So it’s perhaps unsurprising she’s written a cookbook – Ammu, meaning mother – in homage to her.

It was a project that “had been in my heart for a long time,” she says, but when the pandemic hit in 2020, Asma hadn’t visited home in three years. 

“At that early stage you didn't know what was going to happen, if it was ever going to end. I think that sense of yearning comes through in the book.”

What’s more, the closure of her restaurant provided the perfect opportunity in which to put pen to paper. “I was able to write it almost in one sitting, with very little interference from my work or noise around me, in the silence of the pandemic.”

Asma making chicken biryani (Image: Laura Edwards)

The dish that most reminds of her mother? “Chicken biryani. It’s one of the very first things I remember her making. I still make biryani every week, but it’s not the same as my mother’s chicken biryani. It will never be that good.”

When asked what’s next, true to form, Asma is brimming with ideas. She’s keen to expand her restaurant business, “maybe to Paris or New York,” and wants to help “encourage more women to become leaders in hospitality.”

For now though, she bids me farewell and gets back to signing her books. She’s got 3,000 copies to get through before the end of the day, after all.

Ammu is out 17 March and is published by Ebury Press. Darjeeling Express is located at 2a Garrick Street, London, WC2E 9BH, and is currently taking bookings online. You can find out more about Asma by following her on Instagram.

Lead image is courtesy of Urszula Soltys.