Darjeeling Express

Darjeeling Express occupies the top floor of Kingly Court off Carnaby Street, run by chef Asma Khan, who built the restaurant's reputation on an all-female kitchen staffed by home cooks without professional culinary training, a distinctive model in London's restaurant scene. The menu focuses on the home cooking of Calcutta's Muslim and Bengali communities, a regional Indian cuisine rarely represented in London restaurants compared with more commonly seen Punjabi or South Indian styles. The Calcutta biryani, layered with boiled egg and potato in the Kolkata style rather than the more familiar meat-forward biryanis found elsewhere, is the dish most associated with the restaurant, alongside a prawn malai curry finished in coconut milk and a mishti doi, a set Bengali yogurt sweetened with palm sugar, for dessert. The dining room is intimate and unpretentious, with a small open kitchen visible from the tables, reflecting the restaurant's home-cooking ethos rather than a formal fine-dining presentation, even as the cooking has earned significant critical acclaim and a cookbook and television profile for Khan. Portions are generous and designed for sharing across the table, in keeping with the communal way the dishes would traditionally be eaten at home. Reservations are recommended given the restaurant's popularity and limited seating, and the kitchen closes on Sundays and Mondays, running a shorter week than many comparable Central London restaurants. Its location atop Kingly Court, a courtyard of independent restaurants just off Carnaby Street, places it within the busy Soho shopping district, though the top-floor position keeps it comparatively quiet and easy to miss without seeking it out specifically. The restaurant remains one of the most distinctive expressions of home-style regional Indian cooking available in London.