Catching up with Asma Khan

Asma Khan is the creator of Darjeeling Express, a London restaurant that began fifteen years ago as a dinner for 12 guests at home – Indian food, lovingly cooked from family recipes going back generations. The restaurant is run by an all-female staff, and Khan eschews the traditional authoritarian style of kitchen brigades, opting instead for a quieter, more collaborative effort. Khan, who is a UN World Food Programme advocate, recently sat down with The Guardian’s Kate Mossman for an interview – and lunch at an Afghan restaurant.

Khan is on a self-described mission of reeducating people’s tastebuds to a wider spectrum of Asian cuisine than the fiery-hot curries and tomato-forward dishes that have come to dominate the genre. She holds strong opinions about food, and thinks that the idea of what Indian people eat at home has been mischaracterized. “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.”

The two cookbooks Khan has written so far (she has a third coming out in March of 2025) enjoy high ratings by EYB Members. Both focus on Indian home cooking, but her upcoming book, Flavour – Discover the Elements Behind Delicious Indian Cookery, is different. Structured around the six core ayurvedic tastes, namely: Tangy, Bitter, Hot, Sweet, Sour, and Salty and how they correlate to the six seasons in Bengal, this book aims to illuminate Indian cookery by giving you the foundations you need to build balanced flavors, dishes and sumptuous feasts. With core techniques including roasting, grinding and tempering spices, how to cook with ghee, chillies, and onions, and what to add and when to re-balance flavors in a dish, Flavour will empower home cooks to apply fundamental processes intuitively to their cooking.