Asma Khan is an Indian-born British celebrity chef, restaurateur, and award-winning cookbook author. She owns Darjeeling Express, a restaurant in London's Kingly Court and was profiled on the sixth season of the documentary series Chef’s Table on Netflix.
Here’s an exclusive chat with her:
Does it sync in for you - all the love, success and promising future opportunities for you?
I think yes, it does seem at times when I kind of feel oh my God what is happening in my life. It’s so exciting to get recognition. I will be very honest. It feels very good when people are nice to you and kind to you, but I think that you know it is just a road that I am taking right now. Like every actor or actress when you go on stage, the spotlight hits you for a short time and then you walk off the stage and go back into darkness. So while it's here, I’m happy, but I also know that it’s temporary.
You’re one of the only south Asian women in the industry to have broken the glass ceiling. What was that process like? What did it take to do that?
Yes, people often ask me how to break the glass ceiling and I always feel this is not what I want to do. I don't want to be standing anywhere surrounded by glass. I want all the buildings, those doors and windows that keep out women who look like me, who sound like me. Asian women who are not given opportunities and are kept out of many things and this is true for all women, not just Asian women, I want to bring the entire edifice down. I don’t just want to break the glass ceiling. I don’t want any restrictions. I want the spaces opened up so women can be everything she wants to be.
What can we as a community learn in order to work collectively to support each other in our businesses and personal growth?
I think your community, the people of your family, your faith, your culture, and your neighbours, can be your greatest strength, but unfortunately can also be very damaging for you. I think it is very, very important that you build networks within the community that encourage the younger generation, the future leaders in our own community. We applaud them, we praise them. I don't think we should restrict them, we should not be imposing rules on them and yes, it is important for them to speak the language, to celebrate festivals, maybe to wear traditional clothes on Eid, Diwali or Holi. This is all part of our culture, what we need to be able to handle, the community and the culture, hand-in-hand with progress, looking into the future and seeing how this person, this young person in our community can become a leader and change things for all of us.
What is that one moment during your life when you knew that you had arrived?
I think I have to say I felt like I've arrived when Paul Rudd, who I was just staring at sitting at my table in my restaurant and I was very awkward and I asked him, you know, "Can I take a picture with you?" He told me, "Oh my god. I'm so excited! I want to take a picture with you! I've been waiting to take a picture with you! I'm so excited to see you!" You know when someone so famous in Hollywood, an A-lister who is telling you he wants to take a picture with you? Yeah, I think that's probably the time I realized I had arrived.
What can we as a community do to embrace equity, especially when it comes to women and their overall upliftment in every possible way?
I think the change in our community is very important in how girls are looked at. We can start with how we can treat our daughters, that sons and daughters should be treated equally, that they should inherit property equally, that they should all have a stake in the family business because often you see that fathers or mothers who have a business, they can only be taken over by a boy. I think we need to change our attitude toward our daughters because everyone thinks we get them married off and she'll go off to some other family. Yes, she'll go off to some family, but what about her blood family, what about her own people? I think we should hold on to our girls, and even when they are married let them feel they still have a stake, a financial stake, a stake in the business, a stake in the future. So they don't feel suddenly when they got married, that they are thrown away, abandoned or just sent off to some family. I think these are very important changes we need to make in our community. It is only then that people find some amount of equality between boys and girls between families, between daughters and sons, and between daughters-in-law and daughters as well may I add.
What more can we look forward to from Asma Khan?
It's now been a month since we’ve opened up in the new location in Kingly Court. We've come back to the top floor where we started from in 2017. Although we have come back to the same courtyard, we've come back to a much bigger space with a huge massive open kitchen and we have the capacity to seat 96 people. The first restaurant was 55. So it's a homecoming, but to a brighter, bigger space, which is very exciting. For the future, for the restaurant, I think we’ve moved a lot over Covid. We've suffered a lot with having to pivot and do deliveries and I posted biryani and all of that so the first thing that I would hope is some peace for us to have a stable economic situation so we don't face uncertainty and difficult challenges. For myself, I mean I am probably going to be writing another book. I’m going to be doing a lot more filming and media work, but I also want to spend more time setting up the mentoring school for leadership which I had planned to do before Covid but then Covid of course put a stop to all of that. I think that I would really like to use the restaurant, some part of the space, and we have a very beautiful private dining room area and I want to use that to just kind of gather women together so that we can talk about how we can actually help each other move forward and also kind of mentor the future generation of people so that’s kind of really what I’m looking forward to once the restaurant settles down. I want to kind of use the space to gather women around from my community but also from other communities to see how we can help each other.
