Asma Khan interview: ‘I don’t want to be remembered as a celebrity chef, but as a disruptor’

Darjeeling Express has seen A-lister after A-lister walk through its doors this year. Kate Ng talks to owner Asma Khan about how she feels about her own celebrity status

The photo of Asma Khan with Dan Levy and Paul Rudd in her restaurant, Darjeeling Express, that went viral in September 2021 (Asma Khan)

Asma Khan was half asleep, spent from an exciting and exhausting day at the restaurant, when she tweeted a photograph of Hollywood actors Paul Rudd and Dan Levy eating at her Soho restaurant, alongside the caption: “When Paul Rudd returns to your restaurant and brings Dan Levy with him!!!”

The chef, whose Indian restaurant, Darjeeling Express, took London by storm in 2015 following a rave review. Khan and her all-female team of home cooks had zero experience in the hospitality industry and all learned how to run a restaurant on the fly – something Khan seems especially adept at doing, considering how she didn’t know how to cook at all when she first moved to London from Calcutta 30 years ago.

“The next day, my phone melted,” she tells The Independent. “It’s not even the greatest picture, I’m masked because I was serving them and it was the only picture I had. But Asians everywhere were going crazy, and the idea that two big A-lister Hollywood guys were sitting and having a meal that so many could identify with as their culture, I think was quite incredible.”