The elite in India are obsessed with MasterChef Australia, says Asma Khan, by way of explaining a decline in traditional home cooking. A naan the size of a surfboard is delivered to our table; she shows me how the bread has been “stabbed” in the back, to stop it bubbling up like the ones you find in your local tandoori. “No one in India eats naan at home,” she says. “You need a tandoor. Your bloody house would catch fire. People’s idea of what we eat is so warped.”
Though known internationally for her Indian restaurant Darjeeling Express, in Soho (Hollywood celebrities regularly seem to drop in and take selfies), Khan prefers Afghan food to any other, which is why we meet at Watan in Tooting, a vast and fragrant eating house on the high street. Afghan food is free from the tyranny of the chilli and the “addition of tomatoes to everything”, says Khan, who is on a mission to reeducate taste buds about the huge spectrum of “Asian food”. She is on other missions besides: Khan is a UN World Food Programme advocate, and was chosen as one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people of 2024 for her innovations in food and social progress.
“Food is deeply political,” she says. “Why are our famous chefs afraid to link the two? Food means who eats and who doesn’t. Where has the water come from? Who owns the land?
“I come from Bengal, where the famine of the 1940s was a deliberate act by the British government to divert rice towards the forces and starve my people. I don’t understand why chefs keep quiet, while your empire has been built on food. Let’s talk about food, but as a political force – not as your sacred right to eat.”
A deep vein of femininity runs through Khan’s work. Though she is thankful to the Bangladeshi restaurants who made the Brits love chicken tikka over boiled beef and carrots, she is dead set against the “blow your head off” tradition of atomic strength curry and beer.
She talks about the successful male chefs coming out of culinary school in India: “They trained in stainless steel empires, with freezers you could put a corpse in; they had gizmos, food processors and sharp knives, and they all ended up in five-star hotels.” Sophisticated Indian tasting menus all seem to look “French” to her – separate gravy, edible flowers. “Why are you so insecure? I am brown! My food is brown!”
The staff at Darjeeling Express are, famously, a core group of Indian women, many of them “unwanted” second daughters like herself, picked from ordinary jobs and trained up in a series of supper clubs she ran from her Kensington flat 15 years ago.
“They are not chefs that follow menus,” she says. “They are cooking intuitively. It is unspoken and non-verbal. Why? Because Asian mothers are really bad at explaining things.”
Conflicts in her all-female kitchen tend to get sorted out quietly, in pairs, with voices lowered, she has noticed. “There is no public hanging. Male chefs have made cooking into a combat sport. I think it’s a reaction to the idea that cooking is feminine: I’m not the dinner lady! I’m not your grandmother! Sorry, but if you’re constantly screaming at staff it means you’ve trained them badly.”
Nibbling on a tender chicken kebab, Khan suggests that the hardcore, military culture of hospitality – the daunting 14-hour shifts – is propagated by men to preserve a male domain.
“Part of the problem with recruitment is the idea that it’s extremely difficult to work in catering,” she says. “Sorry, but nothing happens between lunch and dinner. It’s not like brain surgery, where you can’t leave the patient because you’re the one doing the operation. Often, they’re just peeling potatoes. Why can’t you have women coming in, doing one shift, and then they can look after their kids? Everybody is bitching about how we cannot recruit. Why are we not talking about how we can improve conditions? We have lost a massive number of people because of Brexit and now people don’t want to come back.”
She points into a sizzling karahi and shows how the sauce on our charsi chicken is retreating from the edges, like the tide going out. That’s when you know the balance of spice is just right, she says. When Khan cooks at home she does so in bare feet, listening to Sufi music: “I can’t think.” In the kitchen, she enters a place where childhood sense impressions come flooding back: the “chhhhh” of mustard seeds going into a frying pan. She didn’t see a freezer till 1991, in a Cambridge college.
But cooking wasn’t instinctual to Khan either, not at the start: born into a wealthy, socialist Muslim family in Kolkata, she has a PhD in constitutional law, and only learned to cook when she became lonely and lost in the UK, and flew back to visit her mother. She gets into conversation with a young female server from Pakistan, who brings us our gagar ka halwa, a traditional carrot pudding. The girl misses home.
“Don’t go back,” says Khan. “Put up with it for a few more months. Otherwise they’ll say you failed. If you stay, all the other women in your family will see that you made it.”
Khan is married to the Soas economist Mushtaq Khan, currently engaged in a sprawling research project on corruption. It was an arranged marriage: “By the time I graduated, still no one had married me, so I told my mother, great, now I can work,” she says. She wrote for the economy pages of Sunday magazine in India, and her betrothed was tricked, by their families, into meeting her for academic research. She revealed the plot as soon as he sat down, and he walked out. But the next day, she heard that he was in reception. She borrowed the sports writer’s shoes and the art director’s shirt, went down to meet him and “told him what he’d be missing out on”.
“He was everything that I wanted,” she says. “Highly intelligent, extremely liberal, deeply political and very interested in justice.” Mushtaq had spent his entire youth as a radical Marxist, she says. “You don’t need to be a Marxist to know the west didn’t get rich by opening its markets. I’m from the colony – you all got rich by monopolies on spice!” She welcomes a Labour government but adds: “I wish there was someone in parliament who had the knowledge and passion to really speak about food.”
Towards the end of our meal Khan returns to the subject of “barracks-style” kitchens and their systemic abuse of staff which, she says, in any other profession would result in resignations. She has horror stories from London restaurants headed by female chefs too. And she has no time for women who “throw away the ladder” when they’ve made it in a male domain.
“For those women, there is a special place in hell, where there is a tandoor. There is a pure chilli paste and there is ghee. Those women will have chilli and ghee rubbed on them and they are sloooowly, inch by inch, roasted.”
She is sipping her milky tea when she casually mentions she has to talk to Google about sustainability after lunch, at 4pm. I tell her it is 3.55pm. We are still in deepest Tooting, and Google is in King’s Cross. She turns on her phone, and it fills up with panicked messages.
It is touching that a woman with such broad visions can still be sidetracked by food, leaving a hundred executives waiting on the other side of town. She is flustered, full of apologies, and flies off into the street.
Darjeeling Express, 2.4 Kingly Court, Carnaby Street, London, W1B 5PW
