Elliot Moss
Welcome to the Jazz Shapers Podcast from Mishcon de Reya. What you are about to hear was originally broadcast on Jazz FM however the music has been cut due to rights issues.
Good morning and welcome to today’s Jazz Shapers with me, Elliot Moss. Jazz Shapers, it is where I bring you the shapers of the business world together with the shapers of Jazz, Soul and Blues. My guest today is Asma Khan, Founder, chef and owner of the Indian restaurant, Darjeeling Express in London. As a child growing up in Calcutta, Asma loved food but she hadn’t learnt to cook ‘despite being always in the kitchen’, she says with her mother who owned a catering business. After moving to the UK in 1991 to join her academic husband, home sickness drove Asma to return temporarily to India to learn how to craft the royal Mughlai dishes of her childhood. Forever rejecting her second daughter stigma, which we will find out more about shortly, and after qualifying as a lawyer, Asma’s passion for food led her to set up clandestine supper clubs in her Kensington flat much to the annoyance of her two boys. These led to a pop-up in a Soho pub and then to the restaurant, Darjeeling Express which opened its doors in 2017 with an all women team running the kitchen. It’s great to have you here.
Asma Khan
Thank you very much.
Elliot Moss
When I see you immediately, I lived in India many years ago, tell me what you are wearing which sounds a ridiculous thing to say, such a facile and superficial thing to say, but it’s, it’s beautiful. Just give me… I’m not even kidding, you are looking at me going why has he asked me what I am wearing?
Asma Khan
No it’s important because this is, I wear a Gutta which normally you wear the Shelvarajudar. This is a traditional outfit in South Asia, a lot of people… India, Pakistan, Bangladesh wear it and I’ve been in this country thirty years; when I tell people this they stare at the clothes because this is what I wear every day, so I didn’t just dress up for you.
Elliot Moss
No I figured.
Asma Khan
I wear this at work, I wear it in all the events I go and it is part of my identity. This is very much you know, what makes me feel comfortable and not everything of my culture, my identity, my faith, I can live with but the things that are close to me, that I feel fit in with my skin, I will wear it, I will do it. So the outfit is one of them you know, I just feel better wearing clothes that I grew up, you know, wearing when I was in India.
Elliot Moss
You are here, your restaurant is here, there is a myriad of other things that you do that are here but where are you in your head Asma before we get on to the, the business. Are you still in India?
Asma Khan
Yes. I am in India and if anyone tapped me from the back and said ‘where’s your home?’ I would still say Calcutta and that is strange because it’s been decades since I left. I have spent more years in this country than I have in India but you know, my roots go down so deep across the oceans to that land and I feel very connected and increasingly because of the politics of what’s happening in India, that people’s identity you know, is linked to their fate, to their name, to the colour of their skin. I think it is so important to still feel. You may not think I belong there – my heart and soul is there – I live there, I breathe there and you know, I’ve said this on many occasions you know, where you know, people walk through the old lanes of Delhi and the dust that flies from Jamal Mosque which is the oldest Mosque over there, that touches your lips, that’s the dust of ancestors, my ancestors, my clan and this is, this is where I belong and even when I walk the soil recognises me.
Elliot Moss
I feel like you should be writing a book as you are speaking but we can’t write the book right now because we are talking about you and we are talking about identity. Tell me about food and where food fits in to your identity and what the purpose of bringing your food to life has been over the years here in the UK?
Asma Khan
I realised very early on that food was my home, when I was homesick in Cambridge I struggled but when I learnt to cook, you know after I had come back from India, Amoo taught me how to cook, my aunts taught me how to cook, my whole family cook, had given me all the family recipes. Strangely enough I learnt all the complicated things. You know obviously I hung round in kitchens, I did in my head know how to cook but physically I had never cooked before. I came back and I could cook everything but India aromas of that small Cambridge kitchenette, I felt the presence of my mother next to me, in those spices I heard the music on the old radio that Amoo listened too, you know, Kishore Kumar, you know, Lata Mangeshkar, Hemant Kumar. I heard the music, I felt her presence and then I realised that you know, if this can happen to me, that I feel transformed away from this ivory tower and this university town back to my home kitchen, I am going to feed other people because this way I will heal them too. I will take them wherever their home is but I wanted to cook. Not for myself, I wanted to feed people.
Elliot Moss
We are going to talk a lot more about this, you’ve just reminded me, Kishore Kumar, is it Rup Tera…
Asma Khan
Yeah.
Elliot Moss
Mastana, which…
Asma Khan
Yes I love that song.
Elliot Moss
…it was one of my favourite songs, it’s an absolute gem. If you haven’t heard of Kishore Kumar, go look him up, he’s extraordinary. In the intro I talked about these clandestine dinners and you talked about ‘I just wanted to feed people’ and you talked about so many more things, dust and soil and so many evocative things. When you started to feed people did you feel more at home yourself?
Asma Khan
Yes. I felt empowered because I went through this long stage of feeling rootless, err worthless. I disconnected from this land where I’d moved to, trying to make friends with the person I’d married, trying to understand this culture.
Elliot Moss
Just explain the marriage bit so people understand.
Asma Khan
Yes, yes. I mean I want to clarify because a lot of people get confused between an arranged marriage and a forced marriage. I happily married my husband, this was arranged as in you know, when you go on online dating you meet up someone, someone connects up with you and you know, it was one of those things where I always told my mother I did not want to marry a feudal, royal person. That’s exactly who I should have married because of my background.
Elliot Moss
So just to be clear, Asma is actually royalty.
Asma Khan
Yes.
Elliot Moss
In generations, yes.
Asma Khan
In generations and I, I was terrified to get married to some kind of feudal you know, person and I wanted a liberal, education person and there someone found this very liberal economist teaching at Cambridge University. The first thing I told him was that I don’t know how to cook, he told me, ‘I don’t believe in gender roles, I will look after you, I will cook for you’. He didn’t tell me he was such a mediocre cook and only knew one thing and also, he ate every meal in college, left me to eat alone and in my life I had never eaten a single meal on my own and a lot of people who have Indian, Asian heritage can understand that. Meal times, no one will let you eat alone. You eat with a whole group of people and there I was eating the same chicken curry for one week that he had made and put in the fridge for me and yeah, so that was my arranged marriage.
Elliot Moss
And you talked, when I asked you the question about did it make you feel at home, yes it did and at what point did you realise these informal clandestine things that were then moving on through the years, was going to become something a bit more of a you know, permanent fixture? You had a pop-up restaurant didn’t you first?
Asma Khan
Yes.
Elliot Moss
And obviously that went pretty well?
Asma Khan
That went very well and initially I started off doing these little kind of secret restaurants, clandestine meetings in my house only for hunger charities. I worked with charities about feeding children in War zones and working in refugee camps and I did that because I felt that this you know, this is a very Indian thing, that you must start in a very auspicious way and I felt that to feed the hungry would be important but I also lacked confidence. I didn’t think anyone would pay to eat at my house and I felt that if they felt they were donating the entire money to a charity and they didn’t like my food they wouldn’t tell me. But then I figured out that this was getting really popular, people seemed like they really loved the food and they wanted to come back and bring their family and bring their partners.
Elliot Moss
And, and these families, Indian, not Indian, English, all sorts?
Asma Khan
All sorts, all sorts and you know, it was really very mixed and a lot of people who were interestingly from backgrounds where they immediately recognised what I thought was here as I felt I went home and I asked to look at them, they don’t look like anyone who would be in my house but there was something in the way that the food was cooked and then I sat and told stories, took everybody back to a time where you know, they may have been children, they went to grandparent’s place. This whole idea of eating together with loved ones. In our mad rat race of adulthood, we had forgotten that meal that we used to eat. Many years later someone left a note on my table in my restaurant and I don’t know who it was, I suspect it was a gentleman eating on his own, he said, ‘I ate this meal, I wept, I cried for a home that I had forgotten existed and now I want to go back home’. And you know, I cried so much because this is what food can do. Food and music are the two things that take you back to a time that you, even you had forgotten and then the memories come back and you know, and I had this you know, the joy of cooking, seeing the eyes of people eating, very hard to explain. It lifted me up, I felt that now my life was worth something and that is why I am still cooking because I feel in some ways that I have some value in this world. Maybe it is the scars I carry from the way that you know, I was born and the way my birth was received but to be worthwhile, to be meaningful was something that really mattered to me and in cooking I could do both.
Elliot Moss
Stay with me for much more from my fabulous Business Shaper today, it’s Asma Khan, she’s the chef and the owner of Darjeeling Express. Right now though we are going to hear a taster from the Mishcon Academy Digital Sessions, they can be found on all the major podcast platforms. Mishcon de Reya’s Victoria Pigott and Dr Rebecca Newton, Organisational Psychologist and CEO of Coach Advisor, discuss the impact of women in positions of leadership and on boards.
You can enjoy all our former Business Shapers await you on the Jazz Shapers podcast and indeed you can hear this very programme again with Asma, if you pop Jazz Shapers into your podcast platform of choice or if you have got a smart speaker you can ask it to play Jazz Shapers and you will be greeted with a taster of our recent shows. But back to today, Asma Khan, Founder, chef and owner of the Indian restaurant, Darjeeling Express in London and their food is described and I am quoting here ‘as a true homage to Asma’s royal Mughlai ancestry and the busy streets of Calcutta’. You said a couple of things I want to pick up on. I think you are right about food and eating together and it is, I mentioned I lived in India, when I lived there it would have been unheard of to eat on your own or not to share actually and that’s the other thing that you just do in that culture, of course you share, whatever you’ve got you offer.
Asma Khan
Yeah.
Elliot Moss
That part, but the eating together thing it feels that’s what those people were coming for because probably they had been sitting there with the warmed up chicken curry or the warmed up whatever it was that someone made. How do you keep the space for yourself in terms of your own sanity. If you are always in an environment where there’s lots of people and where you are naturally hospitable, what if you are not feeling like talking to people and you are there or is it so ingrained in who you are that it doesn’t even, there’s not even a thought process that comes that way?
Asma Khan
I think it is very ingrained in me, I think that I always will seek out people if I am alone. I find being alone uncomfortable, unusual. This is you know, in India I remember we would get up in the middle of the night, seeing random aunts sleeping in some mattress because they missed their train, there is no concept of privacy in Indian homes, you know everybody shares, everybody is together, everybody interferes hugely in what’s happening in your life, everyone has an opinion on what you are wearing, what you are doing. It can be oppressive but you know, I always stepped back and took this and let it wash over because a lot of the things that were being said to me, everybody else found it uncomfortable, I would not let it penetrate through to me because this was often about the way I looked, the colour of my skin, my body shape, the fact that everyone was so worried, who would marry me? So all of this you know, it was quite surprising when you look back that people thought this was okay, to tell you don’t walk in the sun, you are dark enough you know, don’t, don’t eat that because you are fat enough. You know, it was said in such a casual way yet I look back and I am really impressed at what I was then, what I am now and what I will be in the future because I learnt at a very young age that you know, there is a pore of me that I will one day become something and everything that is happening around me is going to wash away and everybody one day will know my name. I will become something. Set the world on fire because I realise that the more you push me down, the more I will rise. It didn’t affect, so it wasn’t that you know, I was like getting affected by this but I was so aware it was happening everywhere around that people needed space and so it was the fact that in that storm I bent but I did not break but everybody else was suffering so it was very strange and I needed to be with people because I needed to see what was happening to other people.
Elliot Moss
There’s an interesting contradiction in something you said which is… and you’ve talked about feeling worthwhile and really what we are talking about now is your purpose in life and the fact that you, you got more strength the more people said you are too this, you are too that, you’re not enough… all that stuff. I read somewhere that you said, and this is the contradiction for me, or the question. You miss India?
Asma Khan
Yes.
Elliot Moss
In your head you are in India and yet you said this apparently, ‘I could only have become what I have become because I lived in London. I couldn’t have done this in Calcutta, an all-female kitchen of housewives, they don’t exist in the East but I could do anything I wanted to in London, I could be anyone I wanted’. So this dichotomy between where you are now and not feeling at home and yet becoming the person you’ve become because you couldn’t be that person over there. Just help me navigate that?
Asma Khan
I know, this is a strange you know, dilemma when you look at it and think you know that would you rather be in India, no. I miss India. That is my spiritual home. My roots are there. I am nourished, I have sustenance from the soil and the culture, the music, the rhythm, the aromas of home but it is absolutely true, I would have been crushed, we would have been shut down, we would never have been allowed to have an all-female restaurant. The men would have stood outside and asked my women leaving late at night, ‘how are you going to go home? what are you doing with your life?’ Here, the thing is people ask me you know, what… do you have an Indian passport, do you have a British passport? I am a Londoner. My identity is to the city. I belong to the city, the city belongs to me. So if it is about countries then it is India but there is something about London and you know, I always say London mirijan, London is my heartbeat. London is my love because the thing is you know, it, it allows us the space to have a restaurant like this, you can be anything you want in London and you know, when I would tell people that I want to open a restaurant and they said ‘who’s going to do the cooking’, I said, ‘all these housewives’ and they said, ‘oh they are not professional’ and I realised that you know, this comes from our huge, huge bias because in every home you go to in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, it is a woman cooking. The moment it is about medium range, high end, fine dining in India or in the West, it’s men and London was going to allow me to be free, that I could do this but I still feel this is a place where I live and I thrive but home for me still is Calcutta and I have that right to be in love with two cities because you know, I will not allow anyone to tell me, you have to pick, I won’t.
Elliot Moss
I love you Asma Khan. Asma Khan, my Business Shaper here, Founder, chef and pretty iconic I think, it’s pretty clear what she thinks, no one is going to be telling her what to think and that’s a good thing. I just want to add a few accolades here for you because people won’t know this. First chef to be featured in Vogue’s 25 Most Influential Women of the Year, just last year. Number 1 on Business Insider’s List of 100 Coolest People in Food and Drink. Listed as one of London’s Most Influential People in the Evening Standard’s Progress 1000 and it could go on. Oh you are also one of Britain’s 101 Most Influential Asians. This fire in your belly and in your eyes. Does it grow or why does it grow I guess? You, you talked about this journey you are on and you know that you will be something and I think you mean that in the least ego possible way ever?
Asma Khan
Yeah.
Elliot Moss
Like you are going to have impact which is positive I see that. Where’s that growth in the belief that that’s going to happen coming from?
Asma Khan
I think it came from feeling that I was being side-lined and dismissed. The need was to prove not just for myself, I could not have driven myself because you know, the list that you were just reading out, everyone has only seen my success. No one has seen my failures. You haven’t seen the doors that were closed on me. The isolation, the abandonment, the fact that there was no chair round the table for me. I’ve been through all of that in darkness, before the world found out who I was.
Elliot Moss
How did you deal with the darkness?
Asma Khan
I waited for the light. I knew it was going to come. I waited for dawn. Night will always be broken with dawn and I knew the light would come.
Elliot Moss
Are you a patient person?
Esma Khan
No. So this is why I work very hard. I work very hard to get out of there and the situations where I felt I was being marginalised and being dismissed and not being given an opportunity, I did all I could and then I used words, I used language and I am very grateful, a lot of people have told me ‘what a waste that you have studied law’. I have to say I’m grateful for having studied law, that I am grateful to having done a legal PHD. It taught me how to be concise with words, that every word that you say, you wait, you understand, that there’s an impact on what you speak and what you say. The spoken word is very important and you know, I, I talked myself to where I am to some extent and the fact that I did three years of you know, legal education and a PHD taught me how to cut back on all the faff and be true to what you have to say, the message is very important.
Elliot Moss
The message is important, the food is important, the restaurant is important, the mission to say ‘excuse me I’m not going to dismiss you women you are going to all work over here, we are going to do something special’, is business important in the context of all the things I’ve just said or is it more important that you are impacting the world positively? I am just trying to suss out the commercial part of you because evidently you can you know, you’re very smart, you can do anything you want to do but what’s, what’s driving you? My sense is this is not a commercial endeavour or do you see the commercial endeavour as a platform upon which you can then use all the other things?
Asma Khan
I think that is not a priority but it is very important to succeed in business, you know, you cannot survive. Otherwise you know, you are like these tree guarding activists, nothing wrong with being that but you have to be able to make it work and I had to practice in front of the mirror to say ‘I am very successful’. I found that very hard because I just thought oh my God that is like you know, such a big ego to be able to say that. I learnt to say that because in my accented voice, as an immigrant Muslin, as a woman who is fifty two, I want others who are listening to this, hear my voice and understand it could be them. In my voice, find your voice and for that I have to succeed as a business. I cannot be some loss making fringe somewhere on some corner trying to you know, I may as well stand on ‘Speakers Corner’ and speak. The impact really is to show that you can be good and good guys can win and you don’t need to be ruthless, you don’t need to crush everything around you. I think there is a very positive part of being in business then there is a motive, an emotion, there is something that drives it because that in the really dark days and everyone who is in business knows they will come, they come, they go. That was what will allow you to pick yourself up and face the next hurdle. Then you have fallen on the first hurdle, you know there are more ahead but you will get up and go because then the business becomes a side issue and your passion takes over. But they have to exist side-by-side. It is neither either or, I don’t think that, that will work.
Elliot Moss
Stay with me for my final chat today with Asma Khan and we’ve got some typically lively New Orleans Blues from Professor Longhair, that’s in just a moment.
Asma Khan is my Business Shaper but not for very much longer. I just want to think about the future for a moment and you. We talked a lot about the incredibly powerful memories of food, your mission to feel at home when you are here, even though it’s not your home but you love here for what it’s given you and all that. If we were having this conversation in twenty years and you were looking back. What would you hope your legacy had been?
Asma Khan
That’s a really good question. I think I would hope that people would understand that you don’t separate food and culture. For many of us food is part of our DNA and because it is part of our DNA we are unaware of how sacred it is, food is sacred, so is my culture and I’ve said this to a lot of people in my restaurant. I will not let you hate me because of my name, because of the colour of my skin, my accented voice and I think food is a bridge that we should all use to connect people. So I hope my legacy would be of the bridge between people, that food was used as a language of love, but food was also used as a battle cry for justice and equality and the fact that you know, you don’t push me aside, you don’t just take my food. I will not let you take my food and not take me. You’ve got to listen to what I have to speak about, you’ve got to hear the stories about my women, about my culture and this is true for many communities, beyond my own community, where we all fit in and we all seem very successful and have done great things in our lives but people need to know your history and your stories and understand that they cannot just dislike you because they are ignorant and you know, I would hope that, that would be the legacy, that I was the storyteller who told the stories of the East together with the food.
Elliot Moss
It’s been amazing listening to you, thank you. I feel very privileged actually, I’ve really enjoyed that and it’s got me thinking about all sorts of things but the next thing I am thinking of is actually what your song choice is which is very banal here on Jazz Shapers but it’s important nevertheless, so Asma what is your song choice and why have you chosen it?
Asma Khan
I wanted to end on a very positive note.
Elliot Moss
Good.
Asma Khan
I think that you know, it should always be uplifting and Nina Simone, Feelin’ Good, I love the song.
Elliot Moss
That was Nina Simone with Feelin’ Good, the song choice of my Business Shaper, Asma Khan. Fundamentally she said that food was my way home, it was her way of feeling like she was in India, it was her way of feeling good about who she was. The importance of eating together, just don’t forget that, that’s what she talked about and so critical in these incredibly busy and stressful times. ‘I waited for the light’, she said when it came to dealing with failures, working hard, working through it and knowing that good times would come and importantly for her in terms of people seeing her for who she is, as a woman and as a Muslim woman, don’t separate food and culture, ‘if you love my food, you are going to love me too’. Absolutely fantastic stuff. That’s it from me and Jazz Shapers, have a lovely weekend.
We hope you enjoyed that edition of Jazz Shapers. You will find hundreds of more guests available to listen to in our archive, just search Jazz Shapers in iTunes or your favourite podcast platform or head over to mishcon.com/jazzshapers.