Express News Service
There is such a boom in Indo-British chefs reinventing desi food that an IPO wouldn’t be out of order. Asma Khan of Darjeeling Express is the outlier. Different from the granny’s-recipes-diaspora-delights tribe that is colonising food channels in tikka masala land, she was the first Indian chef on Netflix’s Chef’s Table.
“Don’t call me a chef. I’m a cook. A home cook, who loves to feed people the food that she has grown up having,” the frizzy-haired Khan insists. Think a table piled with crispy hot samosas, and flaky parathas accompanied by the de rigueur, achaar.
A Sunday breakfast of puri, chana and halwa. Khan’s distinctive cooking style has created a loyal cult over the last decade. Hollywood A-listers Paul Rudd and Dan Levy can’t seem to get enough of her taste of India. The famed British restaurant critic, Fay Maschler, is a fan. A lawyer by profession, who couldn’t even “boil an egg”, Khan took to cooking after she moved to England. Homesickness has a way of nudging the most mundane of imaginations, and she learned from her mother on trips home from London.
The cookbook she eventually authored owes its mojo to mommy. Titled Ammu, it is not just a recipe book; it’s also about their relationship. The mother started Lazeez, a catering service in Kolkata that specialised in Continental and Mughlai food cooked at home. The restaurant at the Kolkata racetrack, too, was operated by her. With such a gastronomic legacy, Khan didn’t need to learn to boil an egg after all.
She started a supper club in her South Kensington apartment in 2012. Its appeal grew through word of mouth and the private experience was reborn as Darjeeling Express, an independent restaurant in Convent Garden. Many of Britain’s businesses are getting back into action after the pandemic; Darjeeling Express reopens in Soho next month.
The dark-eyed, ever-smiling Khan is serious about women’s power. Her eatery is the world’s only Indian restaurant whose staff are all women. The crowning glory on the Darjeeling Express menu is its legendary biriyani. As the buzz goes, it makes people cry (it isn’t the spice). “We cook from our heart, which connects with people. It reminds them of the food they ate as children. It reminds them of something they did not even know they have been missing,” Khan says. One of her favourite food memories concerns biriyani. “In our family, during a wedding, a deg of biriyani would always be kept aside for the family.
French. My cooking is stripped of all
the fanfare. It is basic ghar ka khana,”
says Asma.
At the end of the big night, the women would gather around the pot to eat and share juicy bits of gossip with equal relish,” she says. What’s new on the menu of Darjeeling Express post-Covid?
“More of home cooking. More stuffed paranthas and different versions of eggs. Indians use eggs in interesting ways—from khagina to masala omelette, from nargisi kofta to egg curry. I want to do an Indian version of the ‘full English breakfast’. Don’t come to me for naan. How many homes in India make naan? We make parathas, pooris, and rotis.
We make yellow dal, not kaali dal. We make kosha mangsho, not chicken tikka masala. I will give you a taste of what India eats in its homes. I will not make fancy food that looks French; a cuisine which I genuinely believe is over-rated. My cooking is stripped of all the fanfare.
It is basic ghar ka khana,” says the chef, who is passionate and outspoken about all things culinary from ignorance to hypocrisy. The chef is in India to participate in the sixth edition of the Food for Thought Fest in Delhi on December 18-19.
“We must have such positive conversations around food. I will be immersing myself in food and looking to pick up a lesson or two,” she reveals. Khan herself is a Calcuttan, but the women who work in her kitchen are South Asian immigrants from many countries because of “a certain rhythm to the cooking that connects us. The way we bhuno the masala, the steps that follow one after the other are similar, even though the cuisine might be different”.
Khan, who perhaps is a pioneer of more women in the kitchen cause, reveals its serendipity: “I didn’t plan to make a statement with my all-women kitchen, it just came to be. When I started I was sure that
I wouldn’t have trained cooks on my staff. I didn’t want the culinary school crowd, which is into mass cooking.
I wanted women who cooked intuitively like me, with andaz and jugaad, and cooked from scratch. Mass cooking is not our culture. It is not our food. And, yes, I wanted women to be given their due. Every house has a woman in the kitchen. I want that woman to step forward.”
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