Asma Khan interview: ‘I won’t see independent restaurants crushed’

Asma Khan is feeling uncharacteristically wry. As perhaps the biggest global crisis since the Second World War skips over the year markerline, the 51-year-old restaurateur says simply: “This was not how the story was supposed to go.”

Yes, I say, it’s been quite the plot twist. When the Prime Minister imposed the first lockdown, Khan ran the all-female staffed Darjeeling Express in Soho. Since then it has closed and moved to Covent Garden. Coming out of the third, she will finally be able to properly open it in its new home, something originally announced for November and derailed by the second shutdown. “The challenges that I’ve faced are so incredible. Nothing like this has ever happened before,” she says now.

The first time around, Khan was ahead of Boris Johnson, shutting before being ordered to — “medic friends were telling me, ‘people are getting very ill’, so we closed. I felt so relieved that my entire staff were going home healthy and well” — but says she never considered it would be the last time locking up in Kingly Court. “I had no idea that this would be what it became: such a long, protracted, painful, financially debilitating time. I had 25 people to take responsibility for and I promised everyone ‘no one will go hungry, not your families or children’. But deep inside, I was shaking.”

The move to Covent Garden was a welcome one; when Darjeeling Express opened in 2017, it was already a hit. In 2019, Khan became the first UK-based chef to appear on Netflix’s Chef’s Table and things went up a notch, with the restaurant turning tables four times a day, full for lunch and supper. “There was no room to breathe. We had no storage space and just one fridge. I was desperately trying to find a bigger place.”

Despite the success, moving was easier said than done. “Not a single landlord [wanted to show me] anything. They didn’t think there was anything appropriate on their books for me. I had financials, I had bookings up to a year in advance to show them. But everybody asked me, ‘Do you have an investor? Do you have venture capitalists behind you?’ And the moment I said ‘no’… well, I felt like I was back in India, like I needed to have a suitable boy next to me. It was almost as if I didn’t count.”

Why? “I don’t want to speculate, because I don’t want to depress myself.”

Eventually one “ideal, perfect” site came up, only to fall through without a word said. “I was waiting for the formal agreement to come through and nothing happened. Then I discovered through a third party that a very powerful restaurateur next to that site had told them that they couldn’t give it to me. I couldn’t breathe I was so shocked. It kind of really eroded my belief in humanity.”

Thankfully, an estate agent called Sally French who works for Davis Coffer Lyons saved the day. She heard the story and vowed to help Khan land the best site on her books: the former Carluccio’s flagship that arches around the corner of Garrick and King streets. “When I realised that I might get it, I told the landlord, ‘You have to give this place to me, not for me, but for everyone who has ever felt marginalised in life, who has always felt that they don’t count.’”

The plea worked — “the day we got the keys, all of us were just weeping” — and the site was prepped to open on November 18 with an eight-course, £95 tasting menu of Khan’s authentic Indian. Instead, the grander plans were abandoned and a takeaway deli arrived. Still, finding a place among Covent Garden’s fine dining and Euro-centric spots made Khan feel “like I had fulfilled every dream I had as a child”.

“I could only have become what I have 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 in London. I could be anyone I wanted.”

Still, the city is far from perfect. The safety of Khan’s all-female staff has been an issue thrown into sharp relief by the past fortnight’s news cycle and outpouring of concern over violence against women. “Everybody has to leave two by two. We have a map and we pair people up and they leave together, and those that live further away from Tube stations, they leave first. If they don’t text me to say ‘I’m inside my house’, I dock their wages. And I tell them, don’t bullshit me. I time them, I know!”

Khan is engaged in London’s recovery. She Zooms weekly with Mayor Sadiq Khan (“He’s been very good behind the scenes”) as part of the London Covid Business Forum to discuss the city centre’s bounce back. But she is sceptical of help from Downing Street. “That Rishi Sunak/Gordon [Ramsay] interview! The fact that Chancellor of this country thinks one of the ways that someone in hospitality can pivot is to go on a game show?! I mean, whoa, this is shocking.

“But so many so-called leaders of our industry reflect the interest of the money man. It’s like the Gordon Ramsays of the world are worth protecting, but your small mum-and-pops restaurant in Wembley, in Ealing, even in Chinatown, are not. We are both the same industry, but our lives and our businesses matter less. Independent restaurateurs were crushed.”

Her deli has proven a hit — this paper’s critic Jimi Famurewa is on record as a fan (“this is food with a potency, soul and story that completely speaks for itself”) — but Khan is pleased to be opening for service again, first with the deli menu and 16 no-reservation seats outdoors and from May 19, with reservations for supper. Still, Covid has changed the way she plans to do things, and there are still worries.

“We had to cut back on what we would have wanted to do because we will suffer the same way that every central London restaurant will be suffering when we reopen. There is the lack of tourists, and so many people are working from home which means that they won’t come in for lunch. You’re paying rent for seven days a week but we are not going to be busy seven days a week. I’m very confident our dinner bookings will be full. But the rest? We don’t know how it’s going to work out, we’re working with unknowns.”

One thing for certain is that her signature style of cooking – one that draws on her years in Kolkata and her time in Hyderabad – will retain its fiercely anti-Anglo authenticity. “It’s everything that most Indians recognise: what you eat on the streets, what you eat in your house, and what you eat at a wedding. The food of the rich and the food of the poor.

“This whole idea of fine dining and making Indian food look very refined, dissecting it, is a problem because once the first place doing it got a Michelin star, there was a massive kind of push by everybody else to present Indian as… well, French. It takes away the roots of our food. It also takes away our story.”

While the financial pressure is considerable — “my entire livelihood, my entire life savings are in this restaurant” — health takes precedence, and Darjeeling Express’s new menus have been designed to help keep person-to-person contact to a minimum. “We are introducing something new for us, a very traditional style of eating, a thali. This is an Indian platter, where you get plates, rice and so on. It lets people try different things all at once, which people have always wanted me to do, and to serve, I’ve managed to source palm leaf plates.”

As well as supporting Indian women, who collect the leaves from forest floors, the plates can be handily chucked away after eating, and with everything at once, repeated interaction between the staff and customers is reduced “because it’s still not completely safe”. “It’s going to be a while until the 20-year-olds get vaccinated and that age group of people come into my restaurant, so I need to protect them. This is not the most financially lucrative way to open again, but I’m looking at the safest way to start for my customers and my team.”

Khan may be busy in Darjeeling Express and only set to get busier but you suspect all the success may make no difference to her drive. “I have a voice, I’ve got a successful restaurant and I will be constantly open,” she says, sounding as fierce as she is optimistic, “But I have the compassion to speak up for others because I understand that not everybody has the privilege. Hospitality has closed three times, it is brutal. I don’t want to see it happen again, to see people ruined again.”

You suspect that, on Khan’s watch, it simply won’t be allowed to.