Asma Khan’s Darjeeling Express Will Return to ‘Spiritual Home’ in Soho

Asma Khan in the first Darjeeling Express restaurant, also in Kingly Court, in 2018.

Asma Khan’s celebrated London restaurant Darjeeling Express has found its new location — Kingly Court, in Soho, back where it first opened in 2017.

The restaurant, which evolved out of five years of Khan hosting supper clubs both in her home and across the city, including at a residency at the Sun and 13 Cantons, also in Soho, closed its first space there in 2020, having outgrown the 55-cover space.

It then moved to Garrick Street, in Covent Garden, in November 2020, opening in the height of England’s second COVID-19 lockdown. With 120 covers, and a new tasting menu structure, it afforded the space and base Khan required, but its lack of an open kitchen ran contrary to her beliefs on who the restaurant should showcase.

In March 2022, she duly told Saturday Kitchen that the Garrick Street Darjeeling Express would close: “I am going to move because the real stars of the show are the women in my kitchen … At the moment we’re in a basement kitchen, which is true for most West End places.” The restaurant closed 4 July, but Khan now has a new space for her mixture of Bengali, Hyderabadi, and Kolkatan home and celebratory cooking.

More soon.

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