At Asma Khan's Darjeeling Express in Kingly Court, London, it stands out as the only Indian restaurant in the world where only women work in the kitchen, including three grandmothers. A quite unconventional choice that reflects a precise commitment to women's empowerment.
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We're accustomed to teams of young, ambitious chefs, especially in the competitive London scene. But for her Darjeeling Express in London, Indian chef Asma Khan has made a completely opposite choice: only women, mostly in their fifties, including three grandmothers, all self-taught and often arriving in the kitchen after a painful journey.
"No success in life could even touch the way I felt when I saw these women break their own chains," she explains to the BBC. "Coming from nothing, from memories of hunger, deprivation, blatant racism, they felt free, and that, to me, is the reason why we succeed. When you enter my restaurant, you feel this power. It's cosmic energy, the strength of women. If everyone here laughs and smiles, it's because for her, it's not work. It's liberation."
The restaurant opened in 2017 and immediately stood out for its traditional Indian cuisine, with a home-cooked feel, attracting a VIP clientele. Often inspired by the dishes Asma ate as a child in Kolkata, in the noble palace where she grew up. Her parents indeed came from royal lineage, Bengali on her mother's side and Rajput on her father's, but they raised their children with an egalitarian ideal, reducing privilege to a coincidence of fate and encouraging them to work for the less fortunate.
It was after moving to the UK in 1991, following her marriage to a Cambridge lecturer, that Asma found herself eating alone, missing home-cooked food. Returning for a visit, she then locked herself in the kitchen with her mother to learn its secrets. "When I returned to Cambridge, my husband was stunned. He couldn't believe I was the same person: the queen of the kitchen." So much so that even as she graduated, completed a law doctorate, and became a mother, she continued to think of sizzling spices as her true calling. Yet, she saw no woman as a possible role model to follow.
The rehearsal was the charity dinners at home starting in 2012, prepared with the help of neighborhood babysitters, for which an entrepreneur offered space; this was followed by a pop-up in 2015 and a stop in Soho. Until the move to Kingly Court with the opening of a permanent restaurant, which in 2023 expanded its space into a new location, equipped with an open kitchen. In the meantime, Asma became a celebrity, writing books and appearing on the Chef's Table series, eventually being called to the United Nations.
However, her dedication extended beyond staff recruitment: a percentage of the restaurant's profits goes to fund her "Second Daughters Fund" foundation, which works to counter the discrimination of female children in India and promote their education. "We are a battle cry for justice because in every home, from Afghanistan to Sri Lanka, it is the women who cook. While in restaurants, in the East and in the West, it's always men. We have done what no one dared before. It's a political project, not a business."
