🇬🇧 United Kingdom · Indian cuisine · b. 1969
The Calcutta-born London restaurateur whose all-female kitchen reframed Indian home cooking.
Asma Khan is the founder and chef-owner of Darjeeling Express in London — a restaurant built around the home cooking of the Indian subcontinent and staffed entirely by women, most of them first-generation South Asian immigrants who had never cooked professionally before. She was born in Calcutta (now Kolkata) into a family with Rajput and Mughal lineage on her father's side, and grew up in a household where elaborate home cooking and the rituals of the dastarkhwan (the traditional Indian dining cloth) were central to family life.
Khan moved to Cambridge in 1991 to join her husband, who was beginning a PhD, and found herself unable to cook the food she had grown up with. She returned to Calcutta the following year for an intensive cooking apprenticeship with her mother, aunts and the women of her extended family, and brought back to England a substantial repertoire of Bengali and North Indian home cooking.
She ran a supper club from her flat in Kensington for several years before opening Darjeeling Express above a pub in Carnaby Street in 2017. The restaurant became one of the most discussed London openings of its year — partly for the food, which deliberately rejected the curry-house template and the high-flame Mughlai grand-restaurant template alike in favour of slow-cooked home recipes; partly for the kitchen, which Khan staffed entirely with home-cook immigrant women whom she has trained on the job.
Khan was the first British chef featured on Netflix's Chef's Table (Season 6, 2019), and Darjeeling Express has relocated and expanded twice since. She has been an outspoken advocate for the place of immigrant women in professional kitchens and for the recognition of South Asian home cooking as serious cuisine.
Home cooking is great cooking. Khan rejects the assumption that restaurant cooking must be technically different from — or above — the cooking that happens in domestic kitchens. Her menus deliberately reproduce home recipes from her family's Bengali and North Indian traditions, and her kitchen is staffed by women who learned to cook at home rather than in culinary academies, because she believes that lineage carries forms of knowledge no school teaches.
Restaurant staffed entirely by women, focused on Bengali and North Indian home cooking. Opened 2017.
These recipes from our database reflect the indian cooking tradition that Asma works in. They are not direct reproductions of Asma's copyrighted recipes, but traditional dishes inspired by the same culinary heritage.
“I don't have a single chef in my kitchen who has gone to chef school. They are all women who learned to cook in their grandmothers' kitchens. That is the school I trust.”
— Asma Khan, Chef's Table
“I am not interested in the curry-house lie or the white-tablecloth Mughlai lie. I am interested in what we actually cook at home.”
— Interview, Financial Times
Moves from Calcutta to Cambridge, England, to join her husband, who is starting a PhD.
Returns to Calcutta for an intensive cooking apprenticeship with her mother, aunts and family women.
Begins running a supper club from her flat in Kensington, London.
Opens a pop-up at the Sun and 13 Cantons pub in Soho.
Opens Darjeeling Express on the second floor above the Sun and 13 Cantons in Carnaby Street.
Featured in Chef's Table Season 6 — the first British chef on the Netflix series.
Relocates Darjeeling Express to Garrick Street, Covent Garden after the pandemic forces a move.
Publishes Ammu, a memoir-cookbook centred on her mother's recipes.
Receives MBE for services to the restaurant industry.
Asma Khan is the Indian-born British chef and founder of Darjeeling Express in London. She is the first British chef featured on Netflix's Chef's Table (Season 6, 2019) and runs a restaurant kitchen staffed entirely by women, most of them first-generation South Asian immigrants who learned to cook at home rather than in culinary academies.
Darjeeling Express is currently located in Garrick Street in Covent Garden, central London. It originally opened above the Sun and 13 Cantons pub in Carnaby Street in 2017 and relocated to its current site after the COVID-19 pandemic.
Khan has been explicit that her decision to staff Darjeeling Express entirely with women — most of whom are immigrant home cooks rather than trained chefs — is a deliberate political and culinary choice. She argues that the women of South Asia have always been the keepers of the most refined home-cooking traditions of the subcontinent, but have been almost entirely excluded from professional restaurant kitchens. Her kitchen is an attempt to correct that exclusion at scale.
The menu draws on Khan's Bengali (Calcutta) heritage and her family's North Indian Mughlai roots, but deliberately stays in the register of home cooking rather than restaurant cooking. Signature dishes include puchka (Calcutta-style pani puri), goat dalcha, slow-cooked biryanis, dal puri, and Bengali fish dishes that rarely appear on London menus.
No. Khan studied law and constitutional theory at Cambridge and holds a PhD. She is not a culinary-school graduate. Her cooking training came from her mother, aunts and the women of her extended family in Calcutta during a deliberate apprenticeship she undertook in 1992, and from years of cooking professionally for her own supper club and restaurant since then.
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