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IT BEGINS WITH A PARATHA — square, hot off the griddle, sprinkled with sugar that melts in seconds. Asma Khan remembers sitting in a small flat on Kolkata’s Elliot Road, not quite three years old, listening to the tram rattle past outside. Her bua (here, bua denotes a traditional nursemaid) — whom the children called “Ma” — would tear off a small piece of paratha, dip it gently in sugar, then feed the morsels to Asma and her sister. One day, a crow swooped down and flew off with her portion. Her sister, thin even then, immediately gave her own paratha to Asma. “So I always ate her food!” the celebrated restaurateur and cookbook author recounts.
The paratha Asma describes wasn’t an outlier: In the Khan household, food transcended sustenance to encompass memory, comfort and love. “My bua came from Jalpaiguri when my mother was born; she raised her and then stayed with us her whole life. She was always the feeder,” Asma says. It is as a consequence of experiences like the one described above that she has “always associated food with emotion, with storytelling, with a lot of humour” and above all, “joy”.
Even when the family didn’t have much money, the dining table had enough to entice Asma. “I thought we were the richest people in the world,” she recollects with a laugh. There was always something special prepared just for her: khichdi, Ma’s prawns (mild, onion-laden, made whenever Asma was sad). It was “Asma’s dish”, prepared to her taste. If the other dishes were too spicy, a milder version would be cooked separately for the little girl.
These early encounters with food as an agent of nurturing and narrative would shape Asma Khan in myriad ways. She carried with her the impressions of food as an embrace, of its power — via memory and nostalgia — to heal. “That’s why I write,” she says, “so that people step into this world and become mesmerised when they start cooking. And that their kitchen has those aromas that my kitchen does.”
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The Khan family’s royal lineage meant that food traditions were complex, sometimes eccentric, but always distinctive. “There are a lot of dishes I knew were made in my family that were not prepared anywhere else,” Asma reflects. Shaped by marriage alliances between Muslim royal families, the Khans’ cuisine presented a culinary mingling of Hyderabad, Bihar, and beyond.
Asma’s aunts would make dishes like “the most beautiful haleem, Hyderabadi haleem, pathar ka gosht, mirch ka salan, tamatar ka salan”. From the Rampur side of the family, she got to savour dishes like taar gosht, among other delicacies. Because of her Bihari grandmother, meanwhile, Asma could sample the most divine korma among North Indian kormas. “They fry makhana in ghee and crush it, and that flavour gives a thickness (to the korma) which is not cloying on the tongue,” she reveals.
Thus, the family table saw dishes that were as inventive as they were indulgent: halwa made with onions, kheer made with onions, even halwa made with meat! “You put in enough butter, ghee and sugar, anything will get disguised,” is Asma’s wry observation. Some traditions were the stuff of legend. “I was told that the daal baghar was done with a gold Ashrafi from Akbar, cleaned and kept in the pocket of the head cook,” she laughs.
And then there was the koozi — a Baghdadi speciality and the dramatic centrepiece of all family weddings, including Asma’s. It comprises a whole goat stuffed with chicken, which was in turn stuffed with egg and rice, slow-cooked overnight, and then brought out at the time of the feast like so much theatre. Initially unaware of the dish’s uniqueness, Asma now understands the full import of its legacy, and declares, “I intend to make one for my son’s wedding as well!”.
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Food memories are, in a sense, foundational for Asma. Having lived away from India for over three decades, she believes that “it’s a privilege to have this kind of culinary heritage”.
Still, her path to becoming one of the most influential voices globally in the food world was not preordained. “I told my husband I didn’t know how to cook when we were getting married. He said he didn’t believe in gender roles and that he would cook for me. I was terrible in the beginning. Slowly, slowly, I learned.”
Asma’s experiments in the kitchen, conducted “slowly, slowly”, eventually morphed into a supper club run in her own home, and then into Darjeeling Express — today one of London’s most celebrated restaurants, run entirely by women.
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“Darjeeling Express”, the name of her supper club (she registered it the same night as the viva for her PhD), was picked from a memory: that of the toy train the Khan family took from New Jalpaiguri to Kurseong during the summer holidays. The air would grow crisper as the train climbed higher; if its load was deemed too heavy, passengers would be asked to step off — an event Asma found deeply thrilling. “It was the sense of the start of summer holidays, that feeling of reprieve... I felt like I was, once again, a six-year-old on that train. That’s why I called it Darjeeling Express.”
The supper club that became a restaurant in the heart of London is run by nine women, three of them grandmothers, who sing Kishore Kumar numbers as they cook. Diners see the beating heart of Darjeeling Express as soon as they walk in, courtesy the open kitchen. “These women are the real Darjeeling Express,” says Asma.
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The Darjeeling Express’ journey, like its namesake’s ascent, encountered some bumps. “One of the things that I noticed very quickly when I started the food business was the racism when it came to Indian cuisine. Everyone expected my food to be cheap and cheerful. When I started a tasting menu at £90, I was told no one would come,” Asma recounts.
Bristling at the received wisdom that only Japanese and Korean, among the Asian cuisines, could command a premium, Asma planned a tasting menu that was the exact opposite of what she was told would work (anything laden with truffles and seaweed). Instead, she prepared aloo dum, luchi, kosha mangsho, chicken chaap, paratha and biryani. It sold out “in seconds,” says Asma, adding: ”Everybody understood this was real food.”
Her refusal to dilute her food and identity is uncompromising. “My food is brown, my skin is brown, and I am proud of both. I will not hide my food under edible flowers and put truffles and caviar on top. If you do not think that my food is elevated or sophisticated enough, you’re racist. I come from the most ancient culinary heritage… We were doing sophisticated food when you guys didn’t even know what food was,” she avers.
Asma is unafraid to call out the tendency to erase or gentrify Indian food. She is frustrated by Indian chefs who feel the need to make their food look “French” or “tapas-style” to be taken seriously. Asma thinks it speaks to a lack of confidence and insecurity, a sense of shame in one’s identity. Indeed, her strongest critique is for those who give Indian food a Western gloss. “I heard there’s a restaurant selling sweet caviar — which was just small boondi! Imagine meetha boondi being called sweet caviar. You dismiss our food this way and make a mockery of it. In the search for Michelin stars, everyone is throwing out all the beauty of our heritage,” she rues.
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Today, Darjeeling Express is as much a kitchen as it is a statement: a space where immigrant women, grandmothers, and home cooks find work, dignity and solidarity. Asma speaks of wanting those who enter her restaurant to have a sense of belonging, of putting down their burdens. It’s a quality she’ll do anything to uphold — even if it means occasionally telling off a presumptuous diner or two.
She mentions an incident where an Indian family dining at Darjeeling Express refused to be served by a Black waitress, asking for an alternative staff member. Asma refused and asked the family to leave. Food, she says, must never be used as a weapon. “To be able to eat is a blessing… You are blessed that you eat, that your children eat. I will never understand this kind of hatred — using food as a weapon.”
The younger generation in the industry — and the world itself — is predisposed towards compassion and kindness, Asma thinks, in part due to the greater awareness about (types of) injustice alongside immersion in social media, news, music, drama and politics. It is in this generation that Asma’s hopes rest for the culinary world as well. “The era of Gordon Ramsay-type chefs…aggressive chefs…is over,” she asserts.
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There has, of course, been a personal cost to Asma’s inspiring journey. “I’m a very successful restaurateur. I’m not very successful as a mother,” she says, referring to all the years when she’d only see her children post-11 pm. “I used to touch their feet and say khuda hafiz…I still carry the guilt; I can never forgive myself,” she says, and adds: “But I have decided to accept this and move on. And I hope that my children will forgive me.”
Asma’s son Aris now works with her, handling social media and preparing to take over. She jokes that she still scolds him at work, but his presence is proof that perhaps forgiveness has come.
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As Asma looks ahead, she speaks of wanting to spend more time in Calcutta, to dig deeper into her roots, and to open a leadership school for women.
She also wants to open more restaurants — because love and good food are meant to be shared. Just like Asma’s sister ensuring she had a sugar-dipped paratha even if it means foregoing her own portion. That paratha still counts as Asma’s favourite food, followed by egg rolls with onions. Then there are the essentials: rice, dal, cucumber. “I eat this every day. I think it’s such a blessing to have rice. Rice with butter or ghee… I love it!” she says, before cautioning: “Don’t walk away from comfort food; it’s part of your DNA. It restores your whole idea of who you are. Embrace it!”
She has similarly pragmatic advice for those hung up on carb quotas and calories: Eat everything, but in moderation. And then, in quintessential Asma style, she declares: “People should just chill out. You should eat. Be happy. Be nice to everybody.”
“It’s not that hard.”
Asma Khan was recently in Kolkata at the Kolkata Centre for Creativity, in conversation with chef Doma Wang, for a dialogue celebrating food, culture, and the resilience of feminist kitchen spaces.
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