Asma Khan

The Path

Training at La Martiniere, Calcutta and King's College London sits behind a career that began in the private supper club format at Self-employed in London (2012–2015). That setting fit a style of cooking built for proximity: intimate, direct, and structured around making guests feel received rather than processed. When the work moved to Sun and 13 Cantons in Soho, London (2015–2017), where Asma Khan worked as supper club host and lunch service operator, the register widened without losing its core discipline. The pace changed, the audience changed, but the cooking stayed recognisably tied to welcome, precision, and a domestic sense of scale. Since 2017, the founder-owner and chef role at Darjeeling Express has given Asma Khan a fixed point from which to build. The title is practical, but it also marks the shift from service work to authorship: a restaurant shaped around decisions she carries through the room, the menu, and the rhythm of the meal. It is a trajectory that moves from hosting to making an operation, with the restaurant functioning as the clearest extension of her habits as a cook.

The Work Today

At Darjeeling Express in London, Soho, the work remains centred on Seasonal Indian home cooking. Asma Khan’s approach there is defined less by display than by control of feeling: the food is made to carry memory, comfort, and welcome without separating those qualities from the demands of service. The room, the menu, and the pacing all sit under the same logic, so the dining experience holds together around a single point of view rather than a set of effects.

Signature

Monsoon is listed among Asma Khan’s signature dishes, and the name suggests the kind of force and movement that a dish can carry without losing structure. Within the frame of her cooking, it sits alongside Indian home cooking and its familiar work of balancing nourishment with impact. The signature reads as part of a wider method: food that is meant to reassure, not just impress.

In Their Words “Even before I started cooking myself, I understood that food is a language of love. And when I learned to cook, it stayed the same: I knew I wanted to feed people, to nourish them.” The statement is direct in the way working cooks often are when describing why the work matters. It names the central terms plainly—love, feeding, nourishment—and leaves the point where it belongs: on the plate and in the room. As a description of practice, it keeps the emphasis on what cooking does to people, not on any romance around the cook.

Acclaim

The honours attached to Asma Khan — 100 Most Influential People (2024), Johannes van Dam Prize, Chef Advocate for the United Kingdom (WFP Goodwill Ambassador), and 100 Coolest People in Food and Drink, No. 1 (2019) — place her work in more than one register at once. Some speak to influence, some to advocacy, and some to visibility within the field. Together, they point to a chef whose reach extends beyond Darjeeling Express while remaining anchored to the same idea that has governed the cooking from the start: feed people, and do it with care.