Top TV chef steps in after diners abuse her waitress

BBC saturday Kitchen star Asma Khan has revealed that she confronted a group of diners at her restaurant after they refused to be served by a waitress because of her skin colour.

‘ I have a young girl — she’s a teenager — and she was told by an Asian-Indian family that [because] she’s black they would prefer to be served by someone else,’ says Asma of the incident which happened at her Darjeeling Express restaurant in London’s Covent Garden.

‘I stepped in and made them apologise. I wasn’t aggressive, abusive or angry, or I would be just like them.

If you don’t call it out, nothing changes.’

she fumes: ‘Where is race or gender being mentioned in hospitality? Why am I the only one that talks about it? Am I the only one seeing discrimination?’

Khan, 53 (right), who moved to Cambridge from Calcutta in 1991, found culinary fame when she started Darjeeling Express as a supper club at her West London home in 2012. Within five years of its launch, she moved to a place in soho, staffed with an all-woman team before relocating to Covent Garden. However, the popular Indian restaurant, whose patrons have included London Mayor sadiq Khan and Hollywood actor Paul Rudd, closed its doors for the final time earlier this month. While bookings were still strong, the restaurant’s landlord gave Khan a notice of eviction. she is now struggling to find a new location, blaming the ‘all-white, Mayfair, men only club’ of the hospitality industry. ‘Women are invited as guests, they are not powerful and they’re on the fringes,’ she tells the Ways to Change the World podcast. ‘to the powerful, mainly white, mainly men who network each other and know each other very well, you are an outsider.

‘the fact I’ve managed to get where I have I’m bloody lucky. I could have been sunk by all of them.’