STIRRING UP A STORM

British-Indian chef ASMA KHAN has taken Indian hospitality to London with her restaurant Darjeeling Express, taken her own gender equality activism out into the world in countless little ways, and created meaningful new opportunities for women.

- Primrose Monteiro-D’Souza

The British took many things Indian back home with them, not least their love for Indian food. In London, desi khaana, in the last decade, has found a new custodian, Asma Khan. If there’s one thing you should eat at her restaurant Darjeeling Express, last sited in Covent Garden, people who know food say, it is the biryani. When Asma opens up a dum biryani in full view of her guests for the evening, they say, the aroma that comes up is the smell of history, the scent of the spice trade, the fragrance of India.

Front of house, Asma is hostess and house mother, and every diner is made to feel like a guest in her home. But her heart lives in the kitchen with her squad, women alongside whom she has lived many lifetimes in a decade.

FROM KOLKATA TO DARJEELING EXPRESS

Asma’s story begins in Kolkata, where her birth as a second daughter brought tears to her mother’s eyes, tears she had vowed to brush away. It skips past her days as a self-willed child, her time in college – because her ‘wild’ reputation stymied all the usual marriage proposals – and her marriage to Mushtaq, an academic. They moved to Cambridge in the UK in 1991, and then to London in 1996, where she graduated with a PhD in British constitutional law in 2012 from King’s College London.