Asma Khan

Asma Khan is an Indian-born British chef, restaurateur, and cookbook author. She owns Darjeeling Express restaurant in London's Soho and was profiled on the sixth season of the Netflix documentary series Chef's Table. In June 2019 Business Insider named her number 1 on their list of "100 Coolest People in Food and Drink". Asma was born in July 1969 and grew up in Kolkata. She opened Darjeeling Express, which offers Indian Rajput and Bengali home cooked specialties, in 2017 in Soho. She named the restaurant after a train she rode as a child during summer holidays. Her team consists of Asian immigrant women who all had full-time jobs and were never trained professionally; they worked for Asma on their days off but were able to cut back hours at their other jobs and eventually give them up altogether. Most of the all-female kitchen staff at the restaurant are second daughters. All are South Asian.