Asma Khan finds new permanent home for Darjeeling Express
Revealing the news on Instagram, Khan said that signed the lease on an as yet unnamed location and that it was the ‘beginning of a beautiful journey’ for her restaurant.
“Today is the beginning – Darjeeling Express has a new home, and now it’s official!,” she wrote.
Khan had said previously that she was locating the restaurant to find premises with an open kitchen in order to better allow her all-female kitchen team to be more visible.
This will be the third permanent iteration of Darjeeling Express, which started out life as a supper club before taking up temporary residence at London pub The Sun & 13 Cantons.
It opened as a restaurant proper in 2017 in Soho’s Kingly Court in before closing in the summer of 2020, following the first national Coronavirus lockdown. It later reopened on Covent Garden’s Garrick Street in a former Carluccio's until that also closed earlier this year.
Khan has been running Darjeeling Express as a pop-up in the Pembroke gastropub in South Kensington.
In her Instagram post, Khan thanked lawyers RWK Goodman for working to get the lease done and the landlord’s legal team “who tried to get things done quickly”. She also thanked a “great unnamed person who held my hand throughout & read out passages to me on the phone as he knew I would not read”.
