Asma Khan London, UK

Asma Khan is the founder and owner of the Darjeeling Express Restaurant in London. She is an award-winning cookbook author and restauranteur with a passion for using her platform to give other women from diverse backgrounds more opportunities to succeed.

Asma moved to Cambridge from Calcutta in 1991 to join her academic husband. She is Rajput on her father’s side and Bengali on her mother’s. After studying law, Asma went on to do a PhD in Law at King’s College London. Cooking was her passion and she began her food career in 2012 as a supper club in her home. In 2015, she opened a pop-up in a Soho pub and Darjeeling Express the restaurant opened its doors in June 2017. It is a restaurant serving Indian food lovingly cooked from family recipes that go back to generations with an all-women team of housewives running the kitchen.

A year later, her cookbook “Asma’s Indian Kitchen” was published by Pavilion in October 2018. The book was the winner in the U.K. category for food publishing in Indian cuisine in the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards. Asma’s Indian Kitchen was also shortlisted for best debut cookbook in the Fortnum & Mason 2019 awards. Asma is the first British chef to feature in Netflix’s Chef’s Table. The series’ sixth season, which includes Khan’s episode, was nominated for an Emmy in the Outstanding Documentary section. Asma Khan is married and has two boys.