Asma Khan Says Women Shouldn't Cook For Free

The London restaurant Darjeeling Express is the place to go for an outstanding mutton kebab, and for celebrity sightings. But the chef behind this hotspot has no formal culinary training. Asma Khan started her cooking career hosting secret supper clubs in her apartment, when her husband was traveling for work.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Pashman?

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• 0:43Dan Pashman?

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• 1:08Speaker 01

  I'm not one of those chefs who spends time taking pictures of food.

• 1:11Dan Pashman?

  I'm with you. I like, I hate it when I take time to prepare something delicious or I'm at a restaurant where I'm really, I've been really looking forward to eating and the food finally arrives and I'm really hungry and then I'm like, ah, I should probably take a picture of this for Instagram. Then I'm, but then by the time I'm like, ah, screw it, I'm just gonna eat.

• 1:27Speaker 01

  I, and I'm sure that you remember as well the time when, you know, people never took photographs of food. We didn't have mobile phones with cameras in it.

• 1:34Dan Pashman?

  Right.

• 1:35Speaker 01

  And I, maybe I'm just kind of old fashioned, but I hanker for that time of innocence where it was you photographed in your memory.

• 1:45Dan Pashman?

  Yeah. Why, why do you prefer that?

• 1:47Speaker 01

  I think that, at least for me, I think you should eat with all your senses. I would rather just remember how it tasted than just have this picture on my phone.

• 1:59Dan Pashman?

  Right.

• 1:59Speaker 01

  So I take pictures of my cat because I love my cat. And that's it.

• 2:11Dan Pashman?

  This is The Sporkful. It's not for foodies, it's for eaters. I'm Dan Pashman. Each week on our show, we obsess about food to learn more about people. Quick reminder that next week, we are doing our first New York area live show in nearly two years. March 19th at The Bell House in Brooklyn, my guests will be cookbook author Kenji Lopez Alt and comedy legend Judy Gold will discuss the state of the bagel in America today. Is there a bagel-essence coming? That's a term I just made up, but you know, a renaissance for bagels. Judy was cooking during the recent blizzard. She shared a hilarious video with her wife where things really went off the rails. We'll talk about that. We've got a lot to cover. It's gonna be a ton of fun. Next Thursday, the 19th in Brooklyn. Tickets

• 2:51Dan Pashman?

  and details at sporkful.com/live. Alright, let's get into it. The London restaurant Darjeeling Express is the place to go if you want an outstanding mutton kebab. But it's also a great place to spot celebrities. Keira Knightley and Padma Lakshmi have dined there. Paul Rudd visited multiple times in one month. And last year, the restaurant hosted King Charles and Queen Camilla for a charity event. You've heard of them, right? But the chef behind this celebrity hotspot has no formal culinary training. Asma Khan started her cooking career hosting secret supper clubs in her apartment when her husband was traveling for work. Now she's staffed her restaurant with women who also didn't go to culinary school, who learned to cook as housewives, nannies, and housekeepers. Today, Asma is a regular on British cooking shows and was featured in

• 3:35Dan Pashman?

  the Netflix show Chef's Table. In that episode, you see her walking around the dining room of a restaurant from one table to another. She's sharing stories from her life with the diners, explaining which dishes go with which, and gently scolding one customer who was eating the wrong rice with his meal.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  Two brown rice? Isn't that a bit boring? I'm not saying anything, but just...

• 3:58Speaker 01

  This you should have with white rice. Enjoy life, my dear.

• 4:05Dan Pashman?

  It's clear that Asma's not afraid to speak her mind. So I knew exactly how I wanted to start our conversation. Can I give you a quick lightning round?

• 4:12Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 4:12Dan Pashman?

  This is gonna be rapid fire. Okay, quick questions, quick answers. You ready?

• 4:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:16Dan Pashman?

  Alright, here we go. Here in the US, some people like to put potato chips, or crisps, as you'd call them in England, in their tuna salad sandwiches. The food writer Kenji Lopez Alt once quoted a chef who suggested using Indian papadams instead of chips. What's your take on that?

• 4:31Speaker 01

  Oh my god, no. No. Absolutely no.

• 4:36Dan Pashman?

  Why not?

• 4:39Speaker 01

  It's the way we end meals. I think most people are confused because you go to a restaurant, you get papadum served at the beginning of a meal. You're supposed to eat at the end of a meal. It's how you mop up all the remaining gravy and the chutney is your, you know, the final end to kind of stimulating your palate. So you can start digesting all this lovely food you ate. So for me, papadum is pretty serious. It's the end of a meal. You'll put them in a sandwich. No.

• 5:01Dan Pashman?

  Okay, all right. Next question. Even after 30 years living in the UK, what's one food that still makes you feel like a stranger there?

• 5:11Speaker 01

  I think anything with eel. Do you hear about, you know, this eel pies and eel that you have in, somehow, eel looks too much like a snake for me. I find that really quite distressing.

• 5:26Dan Pashman?

  Okay.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  That someone wants to eat that.

• 5:28Dan Pashman?

  Final question of the lightning round. Which is more annoying, people saying naan bread or chai tea?

• 5:34Speaker 01

  No, that's not a fair question. I mean, I hate both. I, I think chai tea.

• 5:43Dan Pashman?

  Why?

• 5:44Speaker 01

  Chai tea is definitely.

• 5:45Dan Pashman?

  They're both redundant, I understand, but why is chai tea more annoyingly redundant?

• 5:49Speaker 01

  Because the thing is that it is this kind of also the idea that chai tea is what you get in Starbucks, loaded with cinnamon. It's always those people who think that they've had chai tea are the ones buying tea, which is, it's not at all like chai. So it's always that, you know, it kind of, there's a cringe factor because you know that they've had something with a powdered spice in it and it doesn't have any of that layering that chai should have. But I love that question.

• 6:20Dan Pashman?

  I would imagine that you're the kind of person who like, when you're walking around your restaurant and if somebody were to order chai tea or naan bread, you would not be shy about correcting them.

• 6:30Speaker 01

  No, I'm not shy because I always think that this is, I'm doing, this is public service. So that you don't, you don't actually cause grief to someone else who may overhear that.

• 6:39Dan Pashman?

  Right.

• 6:39Speaker 01

  I say it with as much humor and love as I can. But basically I tell them, don't say it.

• 6:50Dan Pashman?

  Asma has written a number of cookbooks, including last year's monsoon and her 2022 book, Amu. Throughout her career, she's celebrated the food of her childhood and also opened up about the trauma she faced growing up in India. She was born in Kolkata in 1969. Her older sister was already in the picture, so Asma was the second daughter. In a culture where boys are prized, having one daughter is considered bad enough. Two?

• 7:13Speaker 01

  The greater family and the rest of society made sure you knew that this was a traumatic time for your family because you were not the blessed one. You were not the boy. You do pick it up very, very early. This was not the best moment for your family and that you are definitely not someone they were hoping for. You put the lights on and you light the whole house up when it's a boy. The house is in darkness when a girl is born. There is no fireworks and there's no celebration. You kept your lights off because you didn't want to tell all your neighbors that we have got a girl.

• 7:54Dan Pashman?

  As Asma grew up, her community provided constant reminders of the difference between girls and boys, especially once her younger brother was born. The disparity was especially visible at the dinner table.

• 8:04Speaker 01

  Food is always about power. Who eats? Who eats what? Who's served what? Men were served first. The boys were served first. Women always ate last and girls ate least. And you hear stories from girls talking about the burnt roti. This is a very emotional. You can't even comprehend and say it, that I always got the burnt roti. It was the rejects that were given to girls, the ones that didn't turn out perfect. It was given to them. And I was, I think I was 45, when I broke an egg, frying an egg, and I told my son, I'll eat this. I'm gonna make another one for you. And I broke down crying because suddenly I remembered

• 8:50Speaker 01

  the number of times that I was served the broken egg. I am still damaged by the childhood where I was made to feel not welcome. But there's another layering, which is not just that I was a second daughter. I was dark, I was fat. I didn't fall into the norms of what was attractive and pretty in my culture. My grandmother would tell me, I still love playing cricket. She used to tell me, don't go out and play cricket. You're already so dark and ugly, you know, no one's going to marry you. My older sister was fair and slim. Damn thing, she looks bloody twenty years younger than me.

• 9:33Speaker 01

  She's just, she's beautiful, she's beautiful. She looks like an actress, she's just stunning. Ironically, she's far smarter than me. Everyone thought she was stupid because she was pretty. But does anyone in the family talk about her? No, they just talk about how beautiful she is and how pretty her saree is. They never talk about the work she does because it doesn't count. It's her looks that is all that people look at.

• 9:58Dan Pashman?

  This was the kind of treatment Asma got from her extended family and her larger community. If a grandmother or auntie or neighbor was cooking, Asma got the burnt roti. But at home, in her immediate family, she did have some protection, thanks to her mother.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  My mother that way was so unusual. She just kind of, you know, so this is, I'm talking about, you know, being served a broken egg in large family gatherings. If my mother was in charge, I would get the best of everything, my sister and me, and equally my brother. She never discriminated and she would make sure that we got the same of everything.

• 10:31Dan Pashman?

  Asma's mother was pretty radical. They had servants at home and once a month, the family took the servants out to dinner at a restaurant. This was unheard of. Asma says they got so many looks when they walked in the door. And the more Asma understood about her own mother's experiences, the more she understood why her mother cared so much about treating her kids equally.

• 10:48Speaker 01

  She's one of five daughters. She is also the dark-skinned one, the middle daughter. And I, I shouldn't, I can say it, she wasn't loved by her parents. So she made it a point to love me, the dark-skinned, overweight, ugly little girl.

• 11:08Dan Pashman?

  Another person Asma could count on was her sister. When relatives called Asma fat or ugly, her older sister would be there.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  She would come in and hold my hand from the back and tell, whisper into my ear, "You are going to be the warrior princess, and the world will know your name." I remember this feeling, that how it made me feel. So powerful that the world looked up to this person, my sister, so beautiful, so graceful. But she told me I was going to rule the world one day.

• 11:47Dan Pashman?

  Asma was the first person in her family to go to college. And after graduating, her mother arranged a marriage for her. She was 22. Her husband, Mushthak, got a job as a fellow in economics at the University of Cambridge in England. They moved there in 1991, leaving her family and friends behind. Asma was very lonely there. The weather was so cold. She'd never seen bare trees. And she wasn't able to conjure a taste of home because she'd never learned to cook. She didn't even know how to boil an egg. Her husband said he'd cook for them, but Asma says he was awful at it. To make matters worse, the Indian food in the UK was completely foreign to her.

• 12:22Speaker 01

  It was shocking. I couldn't recognize any of the dishes. I mean, it's like saying, you know, I'm going to go and have American food. What is American food? Indian food is so regional. So this was what amazed me first, that it didn't seem to have any regional roots of anything. Because in India, you have rice-growing areas, wheat-growing areas. What you eat with rice, because we eat with our hands, it's got a lot of gravy in it. What you eat with bread is quite dry. And here, everything was just mixed up. And then all the dishes came with so much cream and butter. And I told my husband when we came home that I put so much butter and cream in my shoe, "It'll taste nice."

• 13:02Dan Pashman?

  During that first year in Cambridge, Asma was very homesick. But she didn't realize the extent of it until one day, she was riding her bike in a different part of town. She caught the smell of someone cooking parathas.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  I still can smell that aroma of the ghee hitting the wheat, the roasted bit of the paratha. That aroma suddenly, I was transformed back to home, standing in my kitchen. I mean, I cried so much. I wanted to even ring the bell, but I was just so ashamed of the tears. I didn't think I could speak, that I could even ask this person if they'd give the paratha to me.

• 13:47Dan Pashman?

  Asma realized she needed to learn to cook. She didn't even know how to make the paratha that she craved so much. So she went back to India for a month and asked her mother and aunts to teach her everything. Her aunts were not used to sharing their recipes. In fact, there was a rivalry among them. But the fact that she had come back to India worried them. They were afraid she'd leave her husband, so they put their rivalry aside. Asma kept going back for these one-month stints every year. She says she grew closer to her mom during this time, cooking together. Her mother ran a successful catering business in Kolkata and was the first female entrepreneur in the family. She taught Asma to cook by feel, adding a pinch of this or a touch more of that. Some of it was simple dishes like jira-alu, which are cumin potatoes. But she also learned old family recipes like na rangi korma,

• 14:32Dan Pashman?

  a korma with oranges in it that came from her father's great uncle. Over several years, Asma became a more confident cook, exploring her family's roots through food. But she still saw another part of her family's roots as her true calling: social advocacy. Her father and grandfather were both union organizers in India. She worked at Cambridge Women's Aid, supporting women escaping domestic violence. When Asma's husband got a job at the University of London in 1996, her activist bent led her to law school in London and then a PhD in British Constitutional Law.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  It always interested me to find out how rights are enshrined. Deep down, I know that, you know, you need to have protection. Equality needs to be enshrined in law. You need the courts to step in if you are being discriminated against. So this is what fascinated me. How do you protect someone who feels marginalized? It's it's all the same thing. My PhD, the work I do, they're all interconnected. You know, I I'm so tired of aunts who tell me, the same ones who told me I was fat and ugly, that, you know, what a waste. Why did you study? All you're doing now is cooking. And I think like, where do I start trying to explain to them that?

• 15:40Speaker 01

  The skills of advocacy, of understanding justice, came from reading case law and understanding what drives justice.

• 15:49Dan Pashman?

  In 2012, Asma graduated from King's College. She had a law degree and a PhD, which she got while raising two kids. And the thing she wanted to do more than anything else was cook.

• 16:00Speaker 01

  There was no way I'd ever imagined that I could go into a restaurant.

• 16:02Dan Pashman?

  Right.

• 16:03Speaker 01

  The restaurants were like, you know, for big people. I just wanted to feed people and I didn't know what I could do. The British weather is so absolutely diabolical, nightmarish. I couldn't go on the street and sell food because it bloody rained all the time. Then my neighbor told me about a supper club he went to. So it kind of sounded really cool. I just thought, great, this is illegal. You know, you have people in your house and it's, you know, underground. And, you know, so I thought, fine, I'll do it.

• 16:32Dan Pashman?

  You start hosting supper clubs, but only at certain times, only when your husband's out of town.

• 16:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 16:39Dan Pashman?

  So this was happening in secret?

• 16:40Speaker 01

  Not secret. I mean, I just didn't tell him. That's it.

• 16:47Speaker 01

  You know, he doesn't need to know. My husband is very different from me. People stare at him and say, my God, you're still married. He is very serious. He's very, now I know the word for it. He's really into social distancing. He doesn't like people. He is, he's very introverted.

• 17:07Dan Pashman?

  But Asma says when it comes to teaching, Mushthak is like a whole other person.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  My husband is so different when it comes to students. He's very engaged, you know, he's, he's wants to teach. He's, he's interested in knowing what their problems are. He's a phenomenal lecturer. I once sat for a two hour lecture where he lectured without notes. He's incredible. I was just thinking, you know, am I married to this guy? You know, who doesn't speak to me, who has no conversation with me. But on stage, he's on fire, you know, he's talking about things that he believes in. But doesn't like people. So why stress the man out? You know, he's away, he doesn't need to know. And we clean the house, you know, with very, very well. He'd come back and say, oh, the house looks very clean. Yes, it looks very clean.

• 17:52Dan Pashman?

  And you were cooking all the foods that you grew up with, the foods you had learned from your mom.

• 17:57Speaker 01

  Yes, and also it allowed me to serve food in the sequence in which I love. So I had full freedom to present to them the food and tell them, eat this with this. Have that with this, put a touch of this. Because we don't have this idea of courses. It's a very European idea of, you know, first course, a second course. In India, all the food is eaten together. You stimulate the palate, you know, sweet, sour, stryndel, chilies. All of this are meant to work together so that you have a complete experience. Our food is not complimentary. The spices don't work complimentary. They're contradictory.

• 18:35Dan Pashman?

  Asma says in the early days of her supper club, the crowd was parents from her kid's school. Mostly women at first, although men started coming later. As word of mouth spread, the events grew from about 12 people to more like 45. She says very few of them were white British people. It was people of South Asian descent and also transplants from other parts of Europe.

• 18:54Speaker 01

  Everyone was born outside England. They understood that this was about identity. That I was, I was communicating about myself through food.

• 19:06Dan Pashman?

  Despite the success of The Supper Club, Asma shut it down after five years. It was her kids' request. They were 15 and 10 at the time, and they were tired of having to hide in their rooms when 45 people showed up to dinner. Coming up, Asma turns her efforts to opening a restaurant, and she tells us something about that process that she's never told anyone before. Stick around.

• 19:35Speaker 02

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• 19:40Dan Pashman?

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• 22:38Dan Pashman?

  to support the show.

• 22:44Dan Pashman?

  Welcome back to The Sporkful. I'm Dan Pashman. Last week on the show, I talked with Melissa Silva from El Burrito Mercado in St. Paul, Minnesota. The store's been around for nearly 50 years, but over the last few months, things have really changed. Thousands of federal immigration agents swarmed the Twin Cities, detaining hundreds of people and killing at least two American citizens. El Burrito Mercado found itself in the middle of all the chaos, and they stepped up with food deliveries to people too scared to leave their homes. It's all been so intense that Melissa's still processing it.

• 23:13Speaker 03

  I mean, I was born and raised here. Never, ever would I have ever thought that you would be talking about Minnesota like this. And, um...

• 23:22Speaker 03

  To hear this happening and as you're talking, I'm thinking about like, God, that's just what made the news. What about all the stories of the people I know? Like my staff and their families and friends, customers, like the stories go on and on.

• 23:38Dan Pashman?

  This is a really powerful conversation and I hope you'll check it out. It's up now. All right, back to my conversation with Asma Khan.

• 23:46Dan Pashman?

  After Asma stopped hosting her supper clubs, she was introduced to the manager of a pub. He loved Indian food and offered to let her run a pop-up at the pub. Asma doesn't drink, so she hadn't spent much time in pubs, but-

• 23:57Speaker 01

  I was desperate. I really wanted to cook. It was really this thing that I'm nothing to lose.

• 24:02Dan Pashman?

  Asma started cooking in the pub and soon got a glowing review in the Evening Standard. The restaurant critic Fay Mashler praised Asma's goat and potato curry and her Bengali prawn mali curry. She also wrote that the cooks Asma hired for the pop-up were not classically trained, but were Indian housewives who, after their shift at the pub, would go back home and cook for their own families. As the pop-up became more popular, Asma saw her opportunities growing. At the time, she was in her late 40s. She was offered a space in West London to open her own restaurant. She thought she was ready, and she got support from an unlikely source: her husband.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  He's very much into equality, fighting for justice. Politically, we're the same. He does it through economics. I do it through different ways. After years of telling me that I was wrong to leave law, that I could never make a difference to anyone's life, he understood at that point that food had become my way of advocacy.

• 24:57Dan Pashman?

  Now, despite you saying that your husband is so different from you and kind of doesn't really like people, he was eventually on board with the restaurant, is that right?

• 25:06Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah. In the best kind of way, he gave me his money.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  Because I think- Honestly, between the choice of my partner telling me I'm great and I'm the best, and him giving me money, I'd rather take his money. And what Mustafa did was to give me his entire life savings, so I could open a restaurant. I was so unexpected. I ironed all his clothes, because still I saw the money hitting my account. I was so terrified he'd change his mind. I did his entire laundry that night. Because I didn't know that the money doesn't show up till the next morning. So he told me I transferred the money, but I couldn't see it on my account. Then he was laughing once I finished doing his laundry. He told me, "Listen, at six o'clock in the morning, wake up and see your thing. The money's gonna be there." I felt like an idiot for having done all his laundry.

• 25:54Dan Pashman?

  So, so what did that mean to you after, after him being skeptical for so long?

• 25:59Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I think my overwhelming feeling was of relief that I got the money, because I was struggling to find, to raise the money. But I also realized one thing, that I didn't have to go and preen and tell, let him know that I understood, that he believes in me. And this is why, he refused to be on Netflix. They begged him, they were sitting in the study saying, "Will you say a few words?" He said, "I know what you're gonna ask me. The first thing you're gonna ask me is, why did I give her the money? And I will not answer that question." I was smart enough to keep my mouth shut. I literally took his money and I ran. I didn't talk to him about it. I was, of course, in deep inside me, extremely thrilled.

• 26:43Speaker 01

  And I understand, and thank God, I know he's not gonna listen to this, because he never listens to anything that I talk about. He doesn't watch any films, he doesn't read my cookbooks, he's like completely disconnected from what I'm doing. So I can say anything I want about him. That's one relief. And because God helped me the day he actually listens to a conversation like this, that I really feel shit. I'm in such shit. But at the moment, I know he doesn't, he doesn't have time for all of this nonsense. You know, when people on the streets stop and say, "Hey, Osman Khan." He told me, "Wow, they know your name." I was thinking, "Yeah, I'm on television every other day." Of course, they would know my name. But I have never till now gloated on it, or made a point of it. I literally never talk about it. It's this kind of crazy thing that, he gave me a hundred and eighty-five thousand pounds,

• 27:28Speaker 01

  and you would think that at some point, he would raise it, or I would talk about it. He never talks about it, I never talk about it. And we just pretend that it didn't happen.

• 27:38Dan Pashman?

  What are you afraid would happen if you talked about it?

• 27:42Speaker 01

  That the magic would go. You know, I have no idea why he gave it to me. I never asked him for it. And I'll never understand what his thinking was. I want to imagine and dream that it was because he realized that I was gonna make a difference. So I don't want to my dream to be shattered. I've now said this to anyone before, but yeah, that's why I don't talk about it. Because I don't want to know some other reason that he may have had.

• 28:21Dan Pashman?

  With the money from her husband and a glowing review, Asma opened Darjeeling Express. And in keeping with so much of her philosophy, the menu itself was very democratic. Street food right next to fancy food.

• 28:33Speaker 01

  If anyone's traveled in India, you'll know the rich and the very poor live chit to jau. You know, there are slums in the middle of the city. Next to high-rise buildings, you will find, you know, destitute families on the street. And we live with this. But now that I left, and now when I go back, I just find it difficult to understand how, you know, even I, I'm ashamed to admit, never saw the naked, hunger, destitute children. Somehow you get, I don't know, some kind of way of switching off. But once I left, and the first time my son said, Mama, that child has no clothes. First time we saw a street child. Suddenly, I saw all these destitute children.

• 29:18Speaker 01

  And I wanted the restaurant to reflect the reality on the ground and what it is to be Indian.

• 29:25Dan Pashman?

  When the restaurant opened, a lot of people took note of the fact that all the folks cooking in the kitchen were women. Asma said she didn't plan it this way. But women were the only ones who could cook the way she wanted. The men who applied for the job all had the same resume.

• 29:38Speaker 01

  They learned to cook in culinary school. They were trained in Indian five-star hotels. They never learned from their mother. No one would have their boy in the kitchen. So for them, they learned with weights and measures, with timings, with freezers. And souvets and all kinds of gizmos. They have chef's knives. We have nothing in our kitchen. We have a tomato knife. Everybody uses a tomato knife, a small, simple knife, because I tried to get them a Japanese knife. We had to take two of them to hospital that day because they're not used to using sharp knives. You know, we're just how home cooks, we're housewives. And there was no way I was going to survive two minutes in a kitchen with a man who was going to measure and weigh everything and cook without soul.

• 30:22Dan Pashman?

  I heard you in one interview, you said, women cook differently from men in my culture because we were in the kitchen. We served the food. We never got served.

• 30:31Speaker 01

  Yes. I think it makes a big difference because I think the reason why anyone should cook is service. If this is below you, then don't cook. And this is why I think that men in this kind of crazy drive for glory and seeing themselves as chefs. I mean, I'm not taking a pot shot at men. Maybe I am, but I think that too many chefs take themselves too seriously.

• 31:03Dan Pashman?

  I I hear what you're saying and there's this and and you feel that so much of what women are bringing to your kitchen is this tradition of service.

• 31:13Dan Pashman?

  But also the reason why women have traditionally been put in that position and have acquired those skills is in part because they haven't been given any other option.

• 31:23Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 31:24Dan Pashman?

  So through this oppression, they have acquired this ability that is now useful and wonderful in making great food in your restaurant, but it's still tied to something that's not so wonderful.

• 31:37Speaker 01

  This is our problem, that we have allowed the chains, you know, this is your duty, to chain us down and not seeing this as my professional skill that I can monetize, that I can go into business, I can sell my rotis, they are perfect every time. This is what happened to all my women who are working for me. Today, they earn a huge amount of money. And all the men in their family take them very seriously. They are more than all their men put together in the family. This is the new women's movement, entrepreneurship, business. I'm not going to cook because this is what you expect from me. Let us make money.

• 32:30Dan Pashman?

  On the strength of her cooking and her convictions, Asma has become one of London's best-known restaurateurs and celebrity chefs. But despite this success, being a woman in her field remains a struggle, just as it was when she was growing up in India.

• 32:43Speaker 01

  I was so shocked because after I featured in Netflix's Chef's Table, I tried to move out of my first restaurant, which is very, very small. And we were struggling. We were just full for two years, booked up. Not a single landlord showed me any site. This is pre-COVID.

• 33:00Dan Pashman?

  When COVID hit and a lot of restaurants closed, Asma was finally able to move into a better location.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  I had to wait for a global pandemic. I had to wait for male chefs to fail for me to get the site I did.

• 33:12Dan Pashman?

  The second location was bigger, but she didn't like that the kitchen was in the basement, where no one could see the cooks. She wanted a new space with an open kitchen so the cooks could really be the stars of the show. But in the process of finding the restaurant's current spot, Asma felt sidelined once again.

• 33:27Speaker 01

  Now that the world has opened up again, I'm seeing all the big, big boys. Again, they're asking me who my suitable boy is. Our suitable boy was our husband in the suit with the money bags. Now again, they're asking me whether I have anti-capitalist money, whether I have a business advisor, whether I have someone else owns shares in my company. Why are you not willing to accept the fact that I own this entire company on my own? That I personally have the money? And I think the misunderstanding that people think that in the West, women are treated equal. It's not. It's very hidden in the West, especially if you're a female founder. I am never going to be on par with these big boys who come in, who are well-networked, you know, wear the same school tie,

• 34:11Speaker 01

  play football, know each other, go out for drinks. I will never be part of them.

• 34:31Dan Pashman?

  That's Asma Khan, chef and owner of Darjeeling Express in London. Her latest cookbook is Monsoon: Delicious Indian Recipes for Every Day and Season. And by the way, the restaurant will be moving again, hopefully this spring or summer. The new location will still have an open kitchen. Next week on the show, I head to the home of Ifra Ahmed, author of the new book Somalia. Ifra wanted this book to document Somali cuisine, but she's also not afraid to put her own spin on it, like with her Angero breakfast burritos. We talk about that and we cook up sambus for Ramadan iftar dinner. That's next week. In the meantime, check out last week's show about a grocery and restaurant in St. Paul that's had to pivot with the recent ice presence there. That one's up now. And hey, did you know you can listen to The Sporkful on the SiriusXM app?

• 35:13Dan Pashman?

  Yes, the SiriusXM app, it has all your favorite podcasts, plus over 200 ad-free music channels curated by genre and era, plus live sports coverage. Does your podcasting app have that? And there's interviews with A-list stars and so much more. It's everything you want in a podcast app and music app all rolled into one. And right now, Sporkful listeners can get three months free of the SiriusXM app by going to siriusxm.com/sporkful. This episode was produced by me along with managing producer-

• 35:40Speaker 04

  Emma Morgenstern-

• 35:41Dan Pashman?

  and senior producer- Andres O'Hara- and producer- Johanna Mayer- It was edited by-

• 35:46Speaker 04

  Tracy Samuelson-

• 35:47Dan Pashman?

  The show is mixed by- Marcus Hom- and- Jared O'Connell- Music help from Black Label Music. The Sporkful is a production of SiriusXM Podcasts. Our executive producer is Camille Stanley. Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman.

• 35:59Speaker 05

  And I'm Christina from London, England, reminding you to eat more, eat better, and eat more better.

• 36:15Speaker 05

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