The Truth Is with Kathryn Flaschner

Asma Khan: I Came Out Glistening Like Gold

Episode Summary

Asma Khan is the founder of Darjeeling Express — one of the world's only all-female kitchens — the first British chef profiled on Netflix's Chef's Table, and a Time 100 Most Influential Person. In this conversation, we go to the scars underneath the conviction, the women who made sure she knew she was worthy, what she has learned about money and power and justice, and what it means to bend but not break. Her story is personal and it is political and it is spiritual. And it is one of the most complete examples I have encountered of what this show is all about.

Episode Notes

The first time I heard Asma Khan speak, I was sitting in the back of an auditorium in Los Angeles at a crossroads in my life. I didn't know who she was before that day. By the time she finished, something in me had shifted. 

She spoke truth — about her own life and about the world we live in — in a way that felt like an earthquake of permission.

Asma Khan is an Indian-born British restaurateur, cookbook author, and one of the most singular voices in the world right now. Her restaurant Darjeeling Express, in the heart of London's Soho, is home to one of the world's only all-female kitchens — staffed entirely by South Asian immigrant women, home cooks, never professionally trained, many of them second daughters, much like Asma herself. She was the first British chef profiled on Netflix's Chef's Table. She is a Time 100 Most Influential Person, a UN World Food Programme Chef Advocate, and holds a PhD in Constitutional Law from King's College London. Her third cookbook, Monsoon, was released last year.

She is a woman who came to know herself underneath every layer of assumption her culture placed on her — and created her life from that place with such conviction that it changed what was possible for the women and communities around her. Her story is personal and it is political and it is spiritual — and it is one of the most complete examples I have encountered of what this show is all about.

In this conversation we bring her story into the territory this show was made for — what it means to come to know yourself underneath everything you were told you should be, and to create your life with integrity and courage from that place.

We talk about:

• Being born a second daughter in a culture that marked that as a disappointment — and the sister who held the flickering flame
• The loneliness of London, the return to her family's recipes, and what she was building before she knew she was building it
• The Sufi water philosophy that guided her — scarring every hurdle so the women who came after her could just flow
• Why cooking has become a combat sport — and what she built instead
• The economic worthiness of her matriarchal model 
• The PhD in constitutional law she didn't use conventionally — and why Darjeeling Express may be her most constitutional act
• The industry reckoning happening right now — the silence, the victims, and her conviction that change is possible
• What it means to be powerful, successful, and compassionate all at once
• The season of transition she is in right now — hanging on and letting go, autumn before the spring
• And a passage from her favorite book, Khalil Gibran's The Prophet, that feels like the whole conversation in a few lines: Say not I have found the truth, but rather I have found a truth. Say not I have found the path of the soul. Say rather I have met the soul walking upon my path.

Connect with Asma Khan Order Monsoon Instagram: @asma_khan_darjeeling Darjeeling Express: darjeeling-express.com

Connect with The Truth Is Instagram: @thetruthispodcast YouTube: @thetruthis_pod 

Credits Hosted by Kathryn Flaschner, Video Production & Editing by Anton LaPlume, Music by Will Savino — wsavino.com, Visual Identity by Sarah Gainor & Jonathan Bush, Advised by Natalie Tulloch