As Asma Khan (asma_khanldn) brings Darjeeling Express back to Kingly Court, she reflects on its journey over the last five years
, turned the restaurant into a sensation, authored two cookbooks, and became a figurehead for bettering hospitality culture. But the staff at Kingly Court — the maintenance workers, cleaners, and fellow restaurant staff who had been there in the beginning — greeted her not like a celebrity, but a returning friend. “I cried. They knew me when I was nobody,” Khan said last week. “I come back a slightly different person, but they know me still.
She says this was out of necessity, and that it proved to be a boon during the COVID-19 pandemic. It allowed staff to be siloed away as far as was logistically possible, and allowed the restaurant to function as a deli and takeaway hub when dining rooms were closed. But it’s not a situation Khan wants to revisit. “I needed to stay true to who I am, which means being with my women, in the restaurant, in the open kitchen.
Khan envisions this Darjeeling Express as the best version of the two that preceded it, melding the homestyle Bengali and Hyderabadi Mughlai cooking of the original restaurant with the grander, fixed menu structure of the Covent Garden restaurant, which included a biryani tasting menu. Something new will be a breakfast and brunch menu, only available on Sundays, with masala omelettes, stuffed parathas with achar, and halwa puri, the platter of chole masala; sweet halwa; and puri.
Despite the evolutionary success of Darjeeling Express, and the way in which these support networks’s backing have enhanced her ability to take it to the places she wants,“I want me, and my women, to be able to stand and applaud the woman, and her women, who do something better than we ever did, more than we ever did,” she says. So far, she doesn’t see that being allowed.
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