Asma Khan on her female run restaurant Darjeeling Express and discrimination in hospitality
Ways to Change the World with Krishnan Guru-Murthy
Channel 4 News
4.6 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 8 July 2022
⏱️ 40 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Asma Khan is a world-renowned restaurateur and cookbook author who runs London restaurant Darjeeling Express with its kitchen entirely staffed by women.
After two years at her current location in Covent Garden, she has moved on, but she’s struggling to find another place for her restaurant. She blames discrimination in what she called the ‘all white, Mayfair, men only club’ of the hospitality industry.
She joined Krishnan to talk about where her love of cooking real Indian food came from, finding a new home for her restaurant, and writing her recent cookbook for her mother.
Produced by : Nina Hodgson
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Ways to Change the World. I'm Krustin Guru Murphy and this is the podcast |
| 0:07.7 | in which we talk to extraordinary people about the big ideas in their lives and the events |
| 0:12.6 | that have helped shape them. As you will have noticed, we are on location today in the |
| 0:19.2 | amazing, dodgyly express restaurant in Covent Garden because my guest this week is Asma |
| 0:26.6 | Khan, the woman who created this and it's a very unusual business with a very unusual set of |
| 0:32.8 | ideas and philosophies behind it which we're going to explore over the next hour or so. Asma thank |
| 0:39.6 | you for having us and for letting us in. We're actually talking to you because you've brought out |
| 0:47.5 | this brilliant book which is the recipe book. It's a book about how to cook Indian food which is |
| 0:53.5 | quite hard on itself because I know as an Indian boy trying to get his mum to tell them |
| 0:57.9 | active things. It's really hard sort of rice in the Indian recipe but you've done it really |
| 1:02.0 | really well but more than that it's about your life and about the stories around the food |
| 1:06.4 | and about your army. Yes. So what's his army first? Amu is what I call my mother. It's a very common |
| 1:14.2 | way to call a mother among Indian Muslims. I think it's this combination of Amma which is what |
| 1:19.6 | is used in India quite a lot, also in South India quite a lot, and Om which is the Arabic word for |
| 1:24.3 | mother. But you get perhaps unusually in sort of counterintuitive, in terms of what most people |
| 1:30.2 | would expect or think. You're pioneering female soul I guess from your Amu. Yes and the great |
| 1:39.6 | irony is that I didn't realize that till I started writing. I started writing this book in the |
| 1:44.8 | beginning of the pandemic as you know friends parents passed away. My school friends passed away |
| 1:50.4 | with COVID. When it hit India the second wave it ravaged. I lost three members of my family |
| 1:56.1 | and you find that great sense of you know there's a threat of fear also of hope in this book |
| 2:03.7 | that I will be there to give this book to her in her lifetime. And as I started writing I realized |
| 2:11.6 | I was remembering all these stories. I literally wrote this book as a story over 21 nights. I didn't |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Channel 4 News, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Channel 4 News and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.