Asma Khan's Influence on Me

As Asma is celebrated as one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential people, I reflect on her influence on me

Asma in Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People

When my mother died five years ago after a prolonged and horrific battle with cancer, I was a mess to put it mildly. Her death triggered a mental health breakdown and I couldn’t find the touch points I needed to recover. My mother was a ridiculously good cook but horrible at teaching me those skills; partially because it came to her like breathing and she never used recipes or made the same thing the same way twice. She loved watching Lydia Bistianch on PBS while she ironed for my whole life. We both adored the Barefoot Contessa.

I moved out at sixteen for Uni (a story for another post) and then emigrated to London at twenty two alone; so we didn’t have the time becoming an adult and the time to spend every Sunday cooking together. My crazy schedules on trips home meant there were some meals made together but mostly I was in her way. But through Nigella’s tutelage via How To Eat, I had gotten more confident and more experimental in the kitchen. I was known for my meatballs which were actually my mom’s meatballs. And in London I was known for my skills in the kitchen, although compared to her they were non existent. But we were a family centered in the kitchen and love was food. And my mommy was gone and I only ate toast and mash potatoes and wine for 6 months. But I wanted to cook again. I wanted that thread between my mom and I to still exist. Italian food was out of the question though. I couldn’t cook anything that was in her repertoire or carried memories that I wasn’t ready for, and then I saw Asma’s Chef’s Table. (which I am going to rewatch for probably the hundredth time tonight)

The first British chef featured on Chef’s Table was Asma Khan. And this was not a run of the mill episode. If you haven’t seen it, please please do, you will adore it. It is about being the second daughter. About not being expected to shine. About being homesick and breaking every convention and rule. And about launching a restaurant with only home cooks, grandmothers, none trained as chefs, and bringing that food to our lives and tables. About the lack of women given the respect in kitchens though we are the majority of those that cook and serve food in homes.

I was aware of her supper clubs and her popup at the Sun and 13 Cantons. And that her first cookbook was out. I adored her immediately. Her nerve. Her voice. Her bravery. I was blown away by the interviews saying the quiet part loudly. Asma calls out racism. She calls out sexism. And she does so relentlessly and without apology. She lives her values and loves her people and protects them. Later, when her kitchen was in the basement at her Covent Garden location, her team weren’t seeing the people they were feeding and Asma thought that that set up lost the magic and connection and the credit and appreciation for their skills and food. She wanted us to see them cook, hear them sing and thank them appropriately for the love in the food. And now you can again at Darjeerling Express back at Kingly Court.

In my grief, Asma’s food was so far from my mom’s food, but was entirely mom food. It was women’s food. It was comfort from a woman I did not know and who would probably never know the significance of my using her instructions to make paneer from scratch. And it reminded me of making a volcano of flour to make fresh pasta. Only done to teach others, never for practicality or a better product.

I had not been in a kitchen in 8 months. I will never make paneer again, but immersing myself in Asma’s book was also enveloping me in generations from her family and her love. I tweeted about my progress with the recipes and she immediately reached out and her kindness radiated from those first messages.

After that exchange, we went to the Darjeeling Express for my then partner’s birthday. I was greeted like family. I then brought friends to a Biryani Supper Club on my late mother’s birthday. Darjeeling became my dining room when I wanted to show someone I cared and considered them family. And Asma was always her supportive and loving self and knew the significance to me and that I was struggling. She would regularly reach out and send hugs and support when it was needed. And I started to heal.

Later, when my fledgling events company was producing the second London Seafood Festival at Battersea Power Station where her mentor Vivek Singh had just launched Cinnamon Kitchen I proposed a screening of the Chefs Table episode and a collective Seafood Feast with them cooking alternating courses. Vivek is in her episode and I thought it would set the food world alight. It was the biggest draw of the festival and she immediately said yes. It was a sell out and I led the Q&A with both of these amazing and loving humans. That night was the first anniversary of my mother’s death. I spent it with Asma and Vivek and my best friend surrounded by love and food and support for my work and me.

Asma’s love language is food mine is books and I sent her a Jhumpa Lahiri book that I thought she would love. We were in regular contact and I loved her fearless calling out of power houses in the industry; Asma only answers to her moral compass in an industry where “celebrity chefs” sell out constantly.

When lockdown hit, Asma knew that London Seafood Festival 2020 was cancelled and I would be struggling, I had no work for the first time in 20 years and a lot of fear. Without being asked, she sent me some money to help with rent that first month and while I was still figuring out furlough. She treated me like one of her team, which are all her family. She made me hers and made me feel safer and loved. We’re way too close in age to call it maternal, but she was the maternal kindness I needed in super scary times as an immigrant here with no family in this country.

Later when I was hosting a panel on Women in Food, Asma came out to Sussex on a Sunday with very few trains running to be on the panel at a festival where they had run out of food. On that panel we spoke about food and cultural appropriation and an M&S Biryani wrap with no rice. Asma spoke about how you cannot take her food and culture but not want her at your table. Everyone was welcome at her table and to have difficult discussions. And as a trained lawyer, she can decimate any argument about why women’s representation in restaurant kitchens is so pitiful. And the importance of every grain of rice, what her giving her food and recipes to the world means to her.

And why she always said the unsayable about women’s treatment in kitchens. The afternoon of the panel Marco Pierre White had made some outrageous comment about women in kitchens not being able to carry big pots or pull their own weight.

As always Asma called it out and challenged him and rightfully called him a “rambling dinosaur.”

After some transport issues and what felt like an endless struggle to find a taxi for us to the train station our random crew had finally made it to the station. I remember Asma was going home to teach her son how to make chicken before he headed off to University; he has now graduated and part of the family business.

Our merry crew, grateful to be making it back to London was Elif Shafak, Mex (Mecca) Ibrahim, Zeba Talkhani and Asma.

None of us had the right tickets, but I was typically brazen that I could talk my way out of everything— never thinking that my assumption that I could talk my way out of absolutely anything only exists because anything I do is laughed off or excused because I’m a pretty white woman. My party trick is that I could get into anywhere in the world with a clipboard and a walkie talkie. Asma joked that if the ticket collector challenged them, they’d let the American deal with it and we all laughed. And I fell in love with each of those women, and they are women that are all still in my life.

It was the best train ride I ever had. The intimacy of the conversation and the wealth of respect and experiences was beautiful. The topics ranged from mothers to colourism and familial responsibility and duty versus telling our own stories and childhood. As a white woman, I am almost never in the minority and I had never before heard colourism discussed. I shut up and listened. I was grateful to hear their stories and that they trusted me with their childhoods. I also observed how little Elif speaks, but when she does it is the most powerful and profound vignette or a perspective that I not only would never have considered but never thought I could consider. I went home and immediately bought a stack of her books and Zeba’s debut. I inhaled their words.

At that point, I was not even imagining the activism that life would hold for me in the future. I had just quit drinking and Asma and Mex quietly offered support and encouragement. I never anticipated the support I would later get from each of them in my fight for women’s safety and justice against the Met Police. Their work made my work possible. Their support crossed from working in food festivals to advocacy and campaigning.

Later when Asma’s restaurant relocated to Covent Garden and I attended the opening, I gave her one of my late mom’s teacher brooches. When she passed I gave my mom’s dearest friends some of her brooches and eyeglass chains as they were her signature. Because Asma had taught me and loved me and brought me back into the kitchen which was my mother’s domain, I wanted her to have a token of my mother.

She is the only woman that didn’t know my mom that I have given something of hers. That is what Asma means to me.

At her second cookbook launch, I had by then become one of the founders of Reclaim These Streets, but that had all happened during lockdown so I had had meetings with Sadiq Khan and his team but never met any of them in person. I was blown away when he not only knew who I was but pulled me aside to discuss what I actually thought could bring about the needed change to make women safer. His staffer Ally and I bonded over Asma’s food and discussed the crazy roller coaster of my Reclaim These Streets experiences. Asma’s second cookbook was Ammu for her mother.

When I gave my TEDx two years ago, it was largely about my grief and learning to find my purpose again, my coach Tara lost her mom a few weeks into our relationship and had travelled back to India. I didn’t know if it would be too painful for her to continue with me, but she was the most incredible teacher and coach. When I was done the speech, I brought her to Asma’s restaurant and gave her Ammu as a thank you for being absolutely incredible and sharing her own grief with me to strengthen my speech.

That’s the thing. The web of connection when women support and love other women girds our loins. It recognises our struggle and pain and holds us up when we need it. Asma’s own grief over recent years that she’s shared pays respect to her brother but also to all of our experiences as immigrants who sacrifice and straddle two homes.

I was over the moon to watch Asma on Top Chef last year with Padma Lakshmi (who I also adore) and even more excited when I was able to have her team cater the UN Women UK Awards in 2022 that I was producing. To be in a position to hire an all ages female dance troupe that I discovered under Waterloo Station perform, Britian’s biggest Country Star Twinnie as well as the star of the night Ethel Mezieh, a 15 year old Ghanian spoken word poet that I met as a judge for a Digital Disruptors event. When I asked Ethel for a bio she told me her birthday and where she lived. I then asked a few more questions and wrote her bio for Natasha Devon to introduce her that night—- she said “you made me sound so important” and I told her “you are so important.” Her poem and performance brought the house down, she was absolutely incredible. Sharing her world, her experienced as a young Ghanian woman being sexualised whilst still a child and the support shown when a woman she didn’t know squeezed her shoulder on a bus or other women sharing a hair tie and a look in solidarity.

I used the public speaking lessons from Tara to help coach Ethel. And Ethel’s voice was beautiful and powerful and memorable to a packed room of UN Women UK supporters. A 15 year old girl was brave enough to share her truth and it was one of the proudest moment’s of my life, to champion her and all the women I had as my guests to thank them for their work for women. It is all connected.

Watching that speech, while feeding the audience Asma’s food. Asha, Asma’s head cook’s mother was in London for the event as was her son. We welcomed her as our guest, but she wanted to be with her daughter’s team and picked up an apron. Her mother helped prepare the food and feed the audience for UN Women UK. It was an audience full of incredible women that fight for all of us hosted by Natasha Devon as her support for UN Women UK and me. The audience included so many of my heroes, and I was thanking them for their work and celebrating all of us while raising money to help other women.

The audience included Sangita Myska, Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu, Stephanie Yeboah, Ellen Jones, Deborah Francis White, Sofia Ufy Ukor, Rosie Holt, Leyla Kazim, Saima Mohsin, and so many other trailblazing badass heroes of mine.

The company I have now joined as chief communications officer, Tomorrow Group, sponsored the night to support me. Tina Judic, my chairman who would later become central to my life hosted the table. She also runs Digital Disruptors which brought me to Ethel. It is all connected.

That night championed women. And those women champion me.

Today I listened to Asma be interviewed by Anita Rani for Women’s Hour. She then posted “Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder. Help someone's soul heal. Walk out of your house like a shepherd” Rumi. Your flame will not diminish if you light another flame. Rumi who Elif has written extensively about. It is all connected.

Asma champions women. Elif champions women. Mex champions women. Zeba champions women. Tara champions women. Padma champions women. Tina champions women and in turn I do my best to champion women.

Last week Asma was championed as one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people in New York with her sister to accept the honour having been nominated by Padma. And I am so proud. And it is so deserved.

I am one of thousands in Asma’s cheering section and family. Her influence on me was life changing and my mother would be so grateful to her for making me family.

Congratulations Asma. Big Hugs. And thank you.