Darjeeling Express opened in London’s Carnaby Street with a model almost no restaurant has replicated: the kitchen staffed entirely by home cooks, most of them immigrant women with no professional culinary training, cooking the food they grew up making. Asma Khan, who founded it, was the first British chef featured on Netflix’s Chef’s Table. Monsoon, published in 2025, is her third book and her most structurally considered: 80 recipes organised around the six seasons the Indian subcontinent actually has - summer, monsoon, early autumn, late autumn, winter, and spring - rather than the four-season framework imported from European cookbooks and applied indiscriminately. Within that, recipes are arranged by Ayurvedic flavour: sour, tangy, pungent, sweet, salty, bitter, with the argument that any proper Bengali meal should carry at least two. The result is a book with a genuine culinary argument behind it, not a restaurant’s greatest hits set down in print.
£26 - waterstones.com