When Asma Khan was a young girl growing up in India, train travel was a way of life. On holidays, her family would take the train from their home in Calcutta to Aligarh, some 1350 kilometres to the north. They were “quixotic” journeys, as Khan recalls today, far removed from any modern Western notion of travelling by rail.

“It was pretty rough,” she says, speaking over the phone from her London restaurant Darjeeling Express, itself named after a famous Indian train. “We had to carry our own water in one huge urn and be careful not to knock it over because the journey lasted two days and there was no drinking water on board.