INSPIRATION / EXPERTISE, RECOGNITION & FOOD
Asma
Khan
The skill
was already
there.
By Rob Urban
There is an odd promotion that happens to cooking. Prepare a meal for your family and people may call it a duty. Prepare a meal in the right building, wearing the right jacket, and suddenly there is a vocabulary for your expertise.
The onions were not waiting for the jacket.
Asma Khan’s Darjeeling Express makes that distinction hard to ignore. Its London kitchen is staffed by women whose experience includes the home cooking the restaurant openly honors. In its own account of the food and team, the restaurant names the matriarchs of domestic kitchens as an influence, rather than treating them as a charming prehistory to the serious work.
Khan’s achievement is often presented as an all-female-kitchen story. It is that. It is also a story about recognition: who is permitted to have expertise, which kinds of practice count and what an owner can change by deciding to look differently.
A life with
more than
one calling.
Khan came to restaurant ownership by a route that included a substantial academic life. King’s College London records her law degree in 1999 and doctorate in 2013, and describes the supper club she began at home in 2012. It also documents the pop-ups and residencies that preceded the restaurant’s 2017 opening.
Those intermediate stages make the story more interesting than a dramatic career-change caption. A supper club gives a cook guests. A residency brings a different setting and expectations. Opening a restaurant requires a business to hold together around the food. Each setting gives existing knowledge a new set of demands.
There is a difference between asking whether a person can do the work and asking whether their past looks like the past of people already doing it. The second question is easier to process. It can also screen out precisely the person who would bring something the room lacks.
A commercial kitchen adds demands of scale, timing and coordination. Building those capabilities can begin with respect for what a cook already knows: judging a texture, balancing a seasoning, recognizing when an ingredient needs more time. New routines and existing knowledge have to work together.
Look again at
who is cooking.
In a February 2026 Reuters interview, Khan recalled warnings that the restaurant would fail without conventionally trained professionals. The same interview described her preference for British seasonal produce over ingredients imported to meet customers’ year-round expectations.
An owner can create an opportunity. The people doing the cooking still have to make the restaurant worth visiting. Calling that work empowerment does not remove the need to recognize it as work.
This is where flattering language can become surprisingly ungenerous. To say a woman was “given a voice” can imply that she had nothing to say before someone important listened. To call her talent “discovered” can imply that it did not exist when only her family benefited from it. The attention is new. The competence may not be.
Darjeeling Express offers a more useful subject than a founder dispensing confidence. The business puts the cooks’ knowledge into a setting where it can be experienced, discussed and valued by people beyond their households.
Confidence that
makes room to learn.
In a 2020 interview with Borough Market, Khan recalled working alongside chef Asha Pradhan at the Sun and 13 Cantons. Her team wondered whether they should wear chef’s whites. She reminded them that they were already serving as many people, with food she considered just as good.
She also remembered having to go downstairs and apologize when the team made mistakes.
I admire those two memories together. Her confidence leaves room to learn. She can stand behind the women doing the work and take responsibility when something goes wrong. That makes the encouragement feel useful: an owner is there to help carry the difficult part, too.
The kitchen she describes has room for pleasure as well as effort. In the same interview, she spoke about the team singing together. People can be serious about dinner and still enjoy one another’s company.
What grows
here now?
Home cooking is a practice of noticing what is available and knowing what to do with it.
A cuisine is not a museum drawer containing one approved version of dinner. A cook working in London has different produce within reach from a cook working in Kolkata. A restaurant serves guests whose knowledge and expectations vary. Reproducing a familiar name is one thing; preserving the intelligence behind the cooking is another.
In the Reuters interview, Khan gives a concrete example: beetroot from the Fens, near Cambridge, used in beetroot chop with smoked chilies and fennel.
The example makes adaptation easier to understand. The vegetable belongs to the place where the kitchen now works; the dish carries a way of preparing and seasoning it. A tradition can travel through judgment and technique as well as through an ingredient list. That specificity matters in introducing South Asian restaurants through the actual knowledge in their kitchens.
For the guest, this gives a seasonal menu a point of interest beyond what happens to be unavailable. The question becomes what these cooks can make from what is here now.
Beyond the
dining room.
Khan’s public work also reaches people who will never book a table. The World Food Programme appointed her a Chef Advocate in December 2022, identifying women’s empowerment and attention to hunger as central to the role.
In a Food Network interview, Khan said she learned to cook after moving to the UK, when homesickness made her miss her mother and familiar food. She had to learn the practice whose absence she felt. It is a welcome complication in a profile of someone now associated with culinary authority.
Expertise does not have to arrive early to become serious. Nor does a later vocation make everything that preceded it a mistake. The legal education, the migration and the supper clubs belong to the same life, even if a conventional career chart would prefer straighter lines.
Her advocacy extends the discussion from who prepares a meal to who can obtain one. The WFP announcement names her support for its Women are Hungrier campaign and ShareTheMeal. Those efforts give her public profile another use: directing attention toward hunger and the role of women in addressing it.
This series’ essay on José Andrés and useful urgency approaches food’s public responsibilities through emergency response. Khan brings a different question to the collection: whose experience do we recognize before deciding who is qualified to help?
Her story gives us a reason to look again at the people whose competence has become so familiar that we no longer notice it.
A meal can disappear in twenty minutes. The skill required to make it does not disappear with the plates. Khan has built a restaurant around insisting that we remember who was doing the cooking.
About Asma Khan
When did Asma Khan open Darjeeling Express?
The restaurant opened in Kingly Court, London, in June 2017, following supper clubs, pop-ups and residencies.
What did Asma Khan study at King’s College London?
King’s College London records her law degree in 1999 and her PhD in law in 2013.
When was Asma Khan appointed a World Food Programme Chef Advocate?
The World Food Programme announced her appointment as a Chef Advocate for the United Kingdom on December 1, 2022.
Sources: Darjeeling Express’s own account of its kitchen; King’s College London’s biography; interviews published by Reuters in February 2026, Borough Market in November 2020 and Food Network; and WFP’s December 2022 appointment announcement. Reflections on expertise, confidence and recognition are Rob Urban’s.
For more of Rob’s writing and approach to consulting, meet Rob.