Asma Khan: I'm not one of those chefs who spends time taking pictures of food. 

Dan Pashman: I'm with you. I, like, I hate it when I take time to prepare something delicious or I'm at a restaurant where I'm really — I've been really looking forward to eating and the food finally arrives and I'm really hungry. And then I'm like, ah, I should probably take a picture of this for Instagram. But then by that time — I'm like, ah, screw it. I'm just going to eat. 

[LAUGHING] 

Asma Khan: I'm — and I'm sure that you remember as well the time when, you know, people never took photographs of food. We didn't have mobile phones with cameras in it. 

Dan Pashman: Right. 

Asma Khan: And I — maybe I'm just kind of old fashioned, but I hanker for that time of innocence where it was, you photographed in your memory.

Dan Pashman: Yeah. Why do you prefer that?

Asma Khan: I think that at least for me, I think you should eat with all your senses. I would rather remember how it tasted then just have this picture on my phone.

Dan Pashman: Right.

Asma Khan: So I take pictures of my cat because I love my cat and that's it. 

[LAUGHING] 

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Dan Pashman: This is The Sporkful, it's not for foodies, it's for eaters. I'm Dan Pashman. Each week on our show we obsess about food to learn more about people. The London restaurant Darjeeling Express is the place to go if you want an outstanding mutton kebab… but it's also a great place to spot celebrities. Keira Knightley and Padma Lakshmi have dined there. Paul Rudd visited multiple times in one month. And last year, the restaurant hosted King Charles and Queen Camilla for a charity event.

Dan Pashman: The chef behind this celebrity hotspot has no formal culinary training. Asma Khan started her cooking career hosting secret supper clubs in her apartment, when her husband was traveling for work. Now, she's staffed her restaurant with women who also didn’t go to culinary school, who learned to cook as housewives, nannies, and housekeepers.

Dan Pashman: Today Asma is a regular on British cooking shows, and was featured on the Netflix show Chef’s Table. In that episode you see her walking around the dining room of her restaurant, from one table to another. She’s sharing stories from her life with the diners, explaining which dishes go with which, and gently scolding one customer who was eating the wrong rice with his meal.

CLIP (ASMA KHAN): Two brown rice? isn’t that a bit boring? I’m not saying anything but just — this you should have with white rice. Enjoy life, my dear.

Dan Pashman: It’s clear Asma is not afraid to speak her mind. So I knew exactly how I wanted to start our conversation. 

Dan Pashman: Can I give you a lightning round? 

Asma Khan: Yes. 

Dan Pashman: This is rapid fire. Quick questions, quick answers. You're ready. 

Asma Khan: Yeah. 

Dan Pashman: All right, here we go. Here in the U.S. some people like to put potato chips or crisps as you'd call them in England in their tuna salad sandwiches. The food writer, Kenji Lopez-Alt, once quoted one chef who suggested using Indian papadams instead of chips. What's your take on that?

Asma Khan: Oh my God. No, no. Absolutely no.

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS] Why not?

Asma Khan: It's a way we end meals. I think most people are confused because you go to a restaurant, you get poppadom served at the beginning of a meal. You're supposed to eat at the end of a meal. It's how you'd mop up all the remaining gravy. And the chutney is your, you know, the final end to kind of stimulating your palette. So you can start digesting all this lovely food you ate. So for me, papadam is pretty serious. It's the end of a meal. Don’t put them in a sandwich. No.

Dan Pashman: Okay. All right. Next Question. Even after 30 years living in the U.K., what's one food that still makes you feel like a stranger there?

Asma Khan: I think anything with eel. You hear about, you know, this eel pies and eel that you have and is — somehow eel looks too much like a snake for me. I find that really quite distressing that someone wants to eat that.

Dan Pashman: Final question of the lightning round. Which is more annoying people saying naan bread or chai tea?

Asma Khan: No, that's not a fair question. 

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS] 

Asma Khan: I mean, I hate both. 

[LAUGHING]

Asma Khan: I think chai tea.

Dan Pashman: Why? Why is that more?

Asma Khan: Chai tea is definitely — 

Dan Pashman: I mean, they're both redundant, I understand, but why is chai tea more annoyingly redundant?

Asma Khan: Because the thing is that it is this kind of also the idea that chai tea is what you get in Starbucks, loaded with cinnamon, it's always those people who think that they've had chai tea are the ones buying tea, which is — it's not at all like chai. So it's always that, you know, there's a cringe factor because, you know, that they've had something with a powdered spice in it and it hasn't had any off that layering that chai should have. But I love that question.

Dan Pashman: Okay. All right. [LAUGHS] I would imagine that you're the kind of person who like, when you're walking around your restaurant and if somebody were to order chai tea or naan bread, you would not be shy about correcting them.

Asma Khan: No, I'm not shy because I always think that this is — I'm doing — this is public service, so that you don't — you don't actually cause grief to someone else who may overhear that. 

Dan Pashman: Right. 

Asma Khan: I say it with as much humor and love as I can, but basically I tell them, don't say it. 

Dan Pashman: Right. [LAUGHS] 

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Dan Pashman: This week, Asma’s latest cookbook comes out in the U.S. It’s called , and it’s her most personal. Ammu is what Asma calls her mother, Faizana. In the book Asma celebrates the food of her childhood, but she also opens up about the trauma she faced growing up in India. She was born in Kolkata in 1969. Her older sister was already in the picture, so Asma was the second daughter. In a culture where boys are prized, having one daughter is considered bad enough, two? 

Asma has written a number of cookbooks, including last year’s Monsoon and her 2022 book, Ammu. Throughout her career, Asma has celebrated the food of her childhood, and also opened up about the trauma she faced growing up in India. She was born in Kolkata in 1969. Her older sister was already in the picture, so Asma was the second daughter. In a culture where boys are prized, having one daughter is considered bad enough. Two? 

Asma Khan: The greater family and the rest of society made sure you knew that this was a traumatic time for your family because you were not the blessed one. You were not the boy. You do pick it up very, very early that this was not the best moment for your family and that you are definitely not someone they were hoping for. You put the lights on and you light the whole house up when it's a boy. The house is in darkness when a girl is born. There is no fireworks and there's no celebration. You kept your lights off because you didn't want to tell all your neighbors that we have got a girl.

Dan Pashman: As Asma grew up, her community provided constant reminders of the difference between girls and boys, especially once her younger brother was born. The disparity was especially visible at the dinner table.

Asma Khan: Food is always about power, who eats, who eats what, who's served what. Men were served first. The boys were served first. Women ate — always ate last and girls ate least. And you hear stories from girls talking about the burnt roti. This is a very emotional — you can't even comprehend and say it, that I always got the burnt roti. It was the rejects that were given to girls. The ones that didn't turn out perfect. It was given to them. And I was — I think I was 45 when I broke an egg, frying an egg. And I told my son, I'll eat this. I'm going to make another one for you. And I broke down crying because suddenly I remembered the number of times that I was served the broken egg. I am still damaged by the childhood where I was made to feel not welcome, but there's another layering, which is not just that I was a second daughter. I was dark. I was fat. I didn't fall into the norms of what was attractive and pretty in my culture. My grandmother would tell me — I used to love playing cricket. She used to tell me, "Don't go out and play cricket. You're already so dark and ugly. You know, no one's going to marry you." My older sister was fair and slim. Damn thing. She looks bloody 20 years younger than me. She's just — she's beautiful. She's beautiful. She looks like an actress. She’s just stunning. Ironically, she's far smarter than me. Everyone thought she was stupid because she was pretty. But does anyone in the family talk about her? No. They just talk about how beautiful she is and how pretty her sari is. They never talk about the work she does because she doesn't count. It's her looks that is all that people look at.

Dan Pashman: This was the kind of treatment Asma got from her extended family, and her larger community. If a grandmother or Auntie or neighbor was cooking, Asma got the burnt roti. But at home, in her immediate family, she did have some protection — thanks to her mother.

Asma Khan: My mother, that way was so unusual. She just kind of — you know, so this is, I'm talking about being served a broken egg. In large family gatherings,iIf my mother was in charge, I would get the best of everything. My sister and me — and equally, my brother. She never discriminated. And she would make sure that we got the same of everything.

Dan Pashman: Asma’s mother was pretty radical. They had servants at home and once a month the family took the servants out to dinner at a restaurant. This was unheard of. Asma says they got so many looks when they walked in the door. And the more Asma understood about her own mother's experiences, the more she understood why her mother cared so much about treating her kids equally.

Asma Khan: She's one of five daughters. She is also the dark skinned one, the middle daughter. And I shouldn't — I can say it. She wasn't loved by her parents. So she made it a point to love me, the dark skinned, overweight, ugly, little girl.

Dan Pashman: Another person Asma could count on was her sister. When relatives called Asma fat or ugly, her older sister would be there.

Asma Khan: She would come in and hold my hand from the back and tell — whisper into my ear, “You are going to be the warrior princess and the world will know your name.” I remember this feeling that how it made me feel so powerful that the world looked up to this person, my sister, so beautiful, so graceful, but she told me, I was going to rule the world one day.

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Dan Pashman: Asma was the first person in her family to go to college, and after graduating, her mother arranged a marriage for her. She was 22. Her husband, Mushtaq, got a job as a fellow in economics at the University of Cambridge, in England. They moved there in 1991, leaving her family and friends behind.

Dan Pashman: Asma was very lonely there. The weather was so cold. She had never seen bare trees. And she wasn’t able to conjure a taste of home, because she had never learned to cook. She didn't even know how to boil an egg. Her husband said he would cook for them, but Asma says he was awful at it. To make matters worse, the Indian food in the U.K. was completely foreign to her.

Asma Khan: It was shocking. I couldn't recognize any of the dishes. I mean, it's like saying, you know, I'm going to go and have American food. What is American food? Indian food is so regional. So this was what amazed me first that it didn't seem to have any regional roots of anything. Because in India you have rice growing areas, wheat growing areas. What do you eat with rice, because we eat with our hands has got a lot of gravy in it. What you eat with bread? It's quite dry. And here, everything was just mixed up. And then all the dishes give it so much cream and butter. And I told my husband when he came home that I put so much butter and cream in my shoe, it'll taste nice.

Dan Pashman: Right. [LAUGHS] 

Dan Pashman: During that first year in Cambridge, Asma was getting very homesick. But she didn't realize the extent of it until one day, she was riding her bike in a different part of town. And she caught the smell of someone cooking parathas.

Asma Khan: I still can smell that aroma of the ghee hitting the wheat, that roasted bit of the paratha. That aroma suddenly — I was transformed back to home, standing in my kitchen. I mean, I cried so much. I wanted to even ring the bell, but I was just so ashamed of the tears. I didn't think I could speak that I could even ask this person if they'd give the paratha to me.

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Dan Pashman: Asma realized she needed to learn to cook. She didn’t even know how to make the paratha that she craved so much. So she went back to India for a month and asked her mother and aunts to teach her everything. Her aunts were not used to sharing their recipes. In fact, there was a rivalry among them. But the fact that she had come back to India worried them. They were afraid she'd leave her husband. So they put their rivalry aside.

Dan Pashman: Asma kept going back for these one month stints every year. She says she grew closer to her mom during this time, cooking together. Her mother ran a successful catering business in Kolkata, and was the first female entrepreneur in the family. She taught Asma to cook by feel, adding a pinch of this or a touch more of that. Some of it was simple dishes, like jeera aloo, which are cumin potatoes. But she also learned old family recipes, like narangi korma, a korma with oranges in it, that came from her father’s great uncle. 

Dan Pashman: Over several years, Asma became a more confident cook, exploring her family’s roots through food. But she still saw another part of her family’s roots as her true calling: social advocacy. Her father and grandfather were both union organizers in India. She worked at Cambridge Women’s Aid, supporting women escaping domestic violence. When Asma's husband got a job at the University of London in 1996, Asma’s activist bent led her to law school in London, then a PhD. in British Constitutional Law.

Asma Khan: It always interested me to find out how the rights I enshrined — deep down, I know that you need to have protection. Equality needs to be enshrined in law. You need the courts to step in if you are being discriminated against. So this is what fascinated me. How do you protect someone who feels marginalized. It's all the same thing. My PhD, the work I do, they're all interconnected. You know, I'm so tired of aunts who tell me, the same ones who told me I was fat and ugly that, you know, what a waste, why did you study all you're doing now is cooking. And I think like, where do I start trying to explain to them that the skills of advocacy of understanding justice came from reading case law and understanding what drives justice.

Dan Pashman: In 2012, Asma graduated from King's College. She had a law degree and a PhD, which she got while raising two kids. And the thing she wanted to do more than anything else was cook.

Asma Khan: There's no way I'd ever imagined that I could go into a restaurant. 

Dan Pashman: Right. 

Asma Khan: The restaurants were like for big people. I just wanted to feed people and I didn't know what I could do. The British weather is so absolutely diabolical nightmarish. I couldn't go on the street and sell food because it bloody rained all the time. Then my neighbor told me about a supper club he went to. So it kind of sounded really cool. I just thought, great. This is illegal. You know, you have people in your house and it's, you know, underground and you know, so I’m, like, I'm fine. I'll do it.

Dan Pashman: You start hosting supper clubs, but only at certain times only when your husband's out of town. 

Asma Khan: Yes.

Dan Pashman: So this was happening in secret?

Asma Khan: Not secret. I mean, I just didn't tell him that’s it.

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS] 

Asma Khan: He doesn't need to know. My husband is very different from me. People stared at him and say, "My God, you're still married." He's very serious. He's very — now I know the word for it. He's really into social distancing. He don't like people. He is — he's very introverted. 

Dan Pashman: But Asma says that when it comes to teaching, Mushtaq is like a whole other person.

Asma Khan: My husband is so different when it comes to students. He's very engaged. You know, he's — wants to teach. He's interested in knowing what their problems are. He's a phenomenal lecturer. I once sat for a two-hour lecture, but he lectures without notes. He's incredible. I was just thinking, you know, am I married to this guy? You know, who does that speak to me? Who has no conversation with me but on stage he's on fire. He’s talking about things that he believes in. But he doesn’t like people. So why stress the man out? You know, he's away. He doesn't need to know. And we clean the house, you know, but very, very well. If he'd come back and say, "Oh, the house looks very clean." Yes, it looks very clean. 

Dan Pashman: And you were cooking all the foods that you grew up with, the foods you had learned from your mom.

Asma Khan: Yes. And also, it allowed me to serve food in the sequence in which I love. So I had full freedom to present to them the food and tell them, eat this with this. Have that with this, but a touch of this, because we don't have this idea of courses. It's a very European idea of first course, the second course. In India, all the food is eaten together. You stimulate the palate, you know, sweet sour, stringent chilies. All of this are meant to work together so that you have a complete experience. Our food is not complementary. The spices don't work complementary. They're contradictory.

Dan Pashman: Asma says in the early days of her supper club, the crowd was parents from her kids school — mostly women at first, although men started coming later. As word of mouth spread, the events grew from about 12 people to more like 45. She says very few of them were white British people. It was people of South Asian descent, and also transplants from other parts of Europe. 

Asma Khan: Everyone was born outside England. They understood that this was about identity. That I was communicating about myself through food. 

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Dan Pashman: Despite the success of the supper club, Asma shut it down after five years. It was her kids request. They were 15 and 10 at the time, and they were tired of having to hide in their rooms when 45 people showed up to dinner. Coming up, Asma turns her efforts to opening a restaurant. And she tells us something about that process that she’s never told anyone before. Stick around.

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+++BREAK+++

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Dan Pashman: Welcome back to The Sporkful, I’m Dan Pashman. Last week on the show I talked with Milissa Silva, the CEO and co-founder of El Burrito Mercado in St. Paul, Minnesota. The store has been around for nearly 50 years, but over the last few months, things have really changed. Thousands of federal immigration agents swarmed the Twin Cities, detaining hundreds of people and killing at least two American citizens. El Burrito Mercado found itself in the middle of all the chaos, and they stepped up with food deliveries to people too scared to leave their homes. And Milissa is still processing…

Milissa Silva: I mean, I was born and raised here. Never ever what I've ever thought that you would be talking about Minnesota like this, // and, um, to hear this happening. And as, as you're talking, I'm thinking about like, God, that's just what made the news. What about all the stories of the people I know, like the, my staff and their families and friends and customers, like the stories go on and on. 

Dan Pashman: This is a really powerful conversation, and it’s up now, go check it out.

Dan Pashman: OK, back to my conversation with Asma Khan. After Asma stopped hosting her supper clubs, she was introduced to the manager of a pub. He loved Indian food and offered to let her run a pop-up at the pub. Now, Asma doesn’t drink, so she hadn’t spent much time in pubs. But ...

Asma Khan: I was desperate. I really wanted to cook. It was really the thing that I had nothing to lose.  

Dan Pashman: Asma started cooking in the pub, and soon got a glowing review in The Evening Standard. The restaurant critic, Fay Maschler, praised Asma's goat and potato curry, and her Bengali prawn malaikari. She also wrote that the cooks Asma hired for the popup were not classically trained, but were Indian housewives who, after their shift at the pub, would go back home and cook for their own families. 

Dan Pashman: As the pop-up became more popular, Asma saw her opportunities growing. At the time, she was in her late 40s. She was offered a space in West London to open her own restaurant. She thought she was ready. And she got support from an unlikely source: her husband.  

Asma Khan: He's very much into equality, fighting for justice. Politically, we’re the same. He does it through economics. I do it through different ways. After years of telling me that I was wrong to leave law that I could never make a difference to anyone's life, he understood at that point, that food had become my way of advocacy.

Dan Pashman: Now, despite you saying that your husband is so different from you and kind of, doesn't really like people, he was eventually on board with the restaurant. Is that right?

Asma Khan: Yes. Yeah. In the best kind of way. He gave me his money. 

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS] 

Asma Khan: Because I think honestly, between the choice of my partner telling me I'm great and I'm the best and him giving me money, I'd rather take his money. And what Mushtaq did was to give me his entire life savings so I could open a restaurant. It was so unexpected. I ironed all his clothes because still I saw the money hitting my account. I was so terrified he'd change his mind. I did his entire laundry that night because I didn't know that the money doesn't show up til the next morning. So he told me I transferred the money, but I couldn't see it on my account. Then he was laughing. Once I finished doing his laundry, he told me, "Listen, at six o'clock in the morning, wake up and see your thing. The money is going to be there." I felt like an idiot for having done all his laundry. 

Dan Pashman: So what did that mean to you after him being skeptical for so long?

Asma Khan: Well, I mean, I think my overwhelming feeling was of relief that I got the money because I was struggling to find — to raise the money. But I also realized one thing that I didn't have to go and preen and to tell, let him know that I understood that he believes in me, and this is why he refused to be on Netflix. They begged him. They were sitting in the study saying, "Will you say a few words?" He said, “I know what you're going to ask me. The first thing you're asking me is, why did I give her the money, and I will not answer that question.” I was smart enough to keep my mouth shut. I literally took his money and I ran. I didn't talk to him about it. I was, of course, deep inside me, extremely thrilled. And I understand and thank god, I know he's not gonna listen to this because he never listens to anything that I talk about. He doesn't watch any films. He doesn't read my cookbooks. He's like completely disconnected from what I'm doing. 

Asma Khan: So I can say anything I want about him. That's one relief. And because God help me, the day — actually, this is still a conversation that I'd really been shit. I in such shit. 

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHING] 

Asma Khan: But at the moment, I know he doesn't have time for all of this nonsense. You know, when people in the streets stop is, "Hey you’re Asma Khan." He tells me, "Wow, they know your name." I was thinking, "Yeah, I'm on television every other day." Of course they would know my name. But I have never till now gloated on it or made a point of it. I literally never talk about it. It's this kind of crazy thing that he gave me 185,000 pounds. And you would think that at some point he would raise it or I would talk about it. He never talks about it. I never talk about it. And we just pretend that it didn't happen.

Dan Pashman: What are you afraid would happen if you talked about it?

Asma Khan: That the magic would go. You know, I have no idea why he gave it to me. I never asked him for it. And I’ll never understand what his thinking was. I want to imagine and dream that it was because he realized that I was going to make a difference. I don't want to — my dream to be shattered. I’ve never said this to anyone before, but yeah, that's why I don't talk about it because I don't want to know some other reason that he may have had.

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Dan Pashman: With the money from her husband and a glowing review, Asma opened Darjeeling Express. And in keeping with so much of her philosophy, the menu itself was very democratic. Street food right next to fancy food. 

Asma Khan: If anyone's traveled in India, you know, the rich and the very poor live cheek to jowl. You know, there are slums in the middle of the city next to high-rise buildings. You will find destitute families on the street. And we live with this. But now that I left and now that I go back, I just find it difficult to understand how — you know, even I'm ashamed to admit, I never saw the naked, hunger, destitute children. Somehow you get — I don't know, some kind of way of switching off. But once I left and the first time my son said, "Mama, the child has no clothes." First time he saw a street child, suddenly I saw all these destitute children and I wanted the restaurant to reflect the reality on the ground and what it is to be Indian.

Dan Pashman: When the restaurant opened, a lot of people took note of the fact that all the folks cooking in the kitchen were women. Asma says she didn’t plan it this way. But women were the only ones who could cook the way she wanted. The men who applied all had the same resume.

Asma Khan: They learned to cook in culinary school. They were trained in Indian five-star hotels. They never learned from their mother. No one would have their boy in the kitchen. So for them, they learned with weights and measures, with timings, with freezers, and sou vides and all kinds of gizmos. They have chef's knives. We have nothing in our kitchen. We have a tomato knife. Everybody uses a tomato knife, a small, simple knife, because I tried to get them a Japanese knife, we had to take two of them to hospital that day, because they're not used to using sharp knives. You know, we are just house, home cooks. We're housewives. And there was no way I was going to survive two minutes in the kitchen with a man who was going to measure and weigh everything and cook without soul.

Dan Pashman: I heard you in one interview. You said, "Women cook differently from men in my culture, because we were in the kitchen. We served the food. We never got served."

Asma Khan: Yes. I think it makes a big difference because I think the reason why anyone should cook is service. If this is below you, then don't cook. And this is why I think that men in this kind of crazy drive for glory and seeing themselves as chefs — and I mean, I'm talking a pot shot at men, maybe I am, but I think that too many chefs take themselves too seriously.

Dan Pashman: I hear what you're saying and there's this — and you feel that so much of what women are bringing to your kitchen is this tradition of service. But also the reason why women have traditionally been put in that position and have acquired those skills is it in part because they haven't been given any other option. So through this oppression, they have acquired this ability that is now useful and wonderful in making great food in your restaurant, but it's still tied to something that's not so wonderful.

Asma Khan: This is our problem that we have allowed the chains you know, this is your duty, to chain us down and not seeing this as my professional skill that I can monetize, that I can go into business. I can sell my rotis. They are perfect every time. This is what happened to all my women who are working for me. Today, they earn a huge amount of money and all the men in their family take them very seriously. They earn more than all their men put together in the family. This is the new women's movement: entrepreneurship, business. I'm not going to cook because this is what you expect from me. Let us make money.

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Dan Pashman: On the strength of her cooking and her convictions, Asma has become one of London’s best known restaurateurs and celebrity chefs. But despite this success, being a woman in her field remains a struggle, just as it was when she was growing up in India.

Asma Khan: I was so shocked because after I was featured in Netflix’s Chef's Table, I tried to move out of my first restaurant, which is very, very small. And we were struggling. We were just full for two years, booked up. Not a single landlord showed me any site. This is pre-COVID.

Dan Pashman: When Covid hit and many restaurants closed, Asma was finally able to move into a better location.

Asma Khan: I had to wait for a global pandemic. I had to wait for male chefs to fail for me to get the site I did. 

Dan Pashman: The second location was bigger but she didn’t like that the kitchen was in the basement, where no one could see the cooks. She wanted a new space with an open kitchen, so the cooks could really be the star of the show.Eventually she moved Darjeeling Express again – right next door to its original location. In the process of finding the restaurant’s current spot, Asma felt sidelined once again.

Asma Khan: Now that the world has opened up once again, I'm seeing all the big, big boys. Again, they're asking me who, my suitable boys — a suitable boy was a husband in the suit with the money bags. Now again, they're asking me whether I have venture capitalists money, whether I have a business advisor, but I have someone else, own shares in the company. Why are you not willing to accept the fact that I own this entire company on my own, that I personally have the money. And I think the misunderstanding that people think that in the west, women are treated equal. It's not. It's very hidden in the west, especially if you're a female founder, I am never going to be on par with these big boys who come in, who are well-networked, you know, wear the same school tie, play football, know each other, go out for drinks. I will never be part of them.

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Dan Pashman: That's Asma Khan, chef and owner of Darjeeling Express in London. Her latest cookbook is Monsoon: Delicious Indian Recipes for Every Day and Season. And the restaurant will be moving yet again – hopefully this spring or summer. The new location will still have an open kitchen.

Dan Pashman: On next week’s show, I head to the home of Ifrah Ahmed , author of the new book Soomaaliya. Ifrah wanted this book to document Somali cuisine, but she also isn’t afraid to put her own spin on it – like with her anjeero breakfast burritos. We talk about that, and we prepare sambuus  for a Ramadan iftar dinner. That’s next week.

Dan Pashman: In the meantime check out last week’s show, about a grocery and restaurant in St. Paul that’s had to pivot with the recent ICE presence. That’s up now.