Cooking with a conscience

The first time I met the British chef Saima Khan was last November at The London Fine Art studio in Clapham. It was a small fundraiser for the Pakistani charity Daud Bandagi Trust, for which she, with her characteristic generosity, had volunteered to cater for free. Saima was in her element that night, doing what she enjoys most: cooking for a good cause. Dressed in impeccable chef whites, she served up huge helpings of chicken biryani scattered with pistachio nuts, ruby coloured pomegranate seeds and dried rose petals. Relaxed yet professional, she moved among the diners, laughing, chatting and answering their questions with an easy charm. “She’s cooked at the White House for the Obamas, you know,” one of my fellow diners whispered to me during the course of the meal. “She has a list of celebrity clients longer than my arm. Even tonight, her company is catering a really cool party for an A-lister in North London but she chose to be here because she believes in this cause.”

When the dinner ended and her assistants were packing the masses of leftovers - all of which were donated that same night to a shelter for homeless people in London - I asked her if I could interview her. She agreed readily. For a woman who has cooked for the likes of Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, she is refreshingly free of pretension.

"They'd bought ingredients for a four-course French banquet - quail, beef, veal and fish. I turned up and turned those into a Persian feast"

When next I see her, she is looking far less cheerful. We meet for a coffee in a café in St John’s Wood on a cold day in December. Dressed in a dark coat and boots, her shoulders are hunched and her face is drawn. I ask her if she has recovered entirely from the tummy virus that afflicted us both within days of each other.

“It’s not that,” she says, morosely stirring her coffee. “I was outside the Houses of Parliament last night, picketing with friends. For Syria, you know. I’m so angry about what’s going on there. I was trying to help civilians trapped in Aleppo. They are starving. There’s nothing to eat. So we, a group of like-minded friends, were sending money to a few contacts so they could build tandoors and bake fresh bread. Syrians are a proud people and they are entrepreneurial. They don’t like taking charity.” She rubs her eyes. “And then last night I heard one of our key guys there - he was in his twenties - got killed. I couldn’t sleep last night.”



It is the same passion to change things that brought Saima to Clapham, that also motivates her to help beleaguered civilians in Syria. Saima, I sense, for all her financial expertise and business nous, is led by her heart as much as her brain. She would have to be, or she would not have chosen the path that she did.

Up until 2011, Saima Khan was a high-flying banker. Before then, she had worked in the financial industry, based in Singapore, Zurich and New York for twenty years. “I had worked for prestigious companies like Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and was making a six-figure salary and enjoying myself, but my hours were crazy,” she recalls. “I was always rushing, travelling non-stop and clocking fourteen-hour days regularly.” It was while living abroad and coping with homesickness that Saima started cooking. “Cooking was a way of connecting with my home, my roots,” she says. At home in the UK, her Pakistani-born parents - her father is from Domeli, a village near Gujranwala and her mother was raised in Rawalpindi - had always cooked. “Actually my mum, who was a school teacher, cooked most days but she never enjoyed it. For her it was a chore. But my Dad (a businessman) really loved it. He took great pains over the preparation and presentation of food.” At her parents’ home Saima hadn’t been taught to cook, but living away, she discovered that not only did she enjoy cooking but, like her father, she had a real knack for presentation.

Unknown to Saima at the time, Warren Buffet was a curry fiend.

As Saima’s interest and confidence in cooking grew, she started experimenting with Persian, Lebanese and Turkish dishes as well as Nordic cuisine. “I like food that is created for sharing with family and friends. I like the experience of breaking bread together. It brings people together like nothing else. If you don’t drink, really it’s the only way you can socialise in the West.” Before long she was hosting dinner parties for up to thirty friends at a time. Where once she had splurged on designer bags and shoes, she now began amassing cookbooks as well as huge platters and bowls and vivid glasses. “I love beautiful presentation. You savour food as much with your eyes as you do with your taste buds. In New York I had my own bailna for rolling chappatis that my father brought on a trip to Pakistan and also a proper cast iron tawa that weighs a ton, and has travelled everywhere with me. It has the same number of air-miles as I do.”

In 2010, while in London she received a panicked call from a friend. The friend’s aunt was holding an anniversary dinner party for forty wealthy guests who had flown in from all over the world and had been ditched at the last minute by her French chef. Would Saima, please, please, please cook instead?

“They’d already bought all the ingredients for a four-course French banquet,” she says. “Quail, beef, veal and fish. I turned up with my box of spices and platters and turned those very same ingredients into a sharing Persian feast.” The meal went down a storm and Saima came away with four new commissions to cook in the south of France. From then on, she was a banker during the week and a chef at the weekends. It was hard, tiring work, but Saima relished the different challenges her two separate jobs presented. “I toyed with the idea of cooking full time,” she says, “but it wasn’t as if I was fed up of my day job and looking for a way out.” Besides, she was making a good salary and wasn’t sure if a full-time job as a caterer would bring the same financial rewards.

And then one day, she had an encounter that was to change her life. She was employed at the time by Berkshire Hathaway, a company owned by the legendary American investor, Warren Buffet. She was at Omaha airport waiting to catch a flight home to New York when she ran into Warren Buffet, seated on an adjacent chair, reading a newspaper. He was also flying out to New York on his private jet. Saima had worked in his firm for a while then but she had never engaged in casual chit chat with him - and though she doesn’t say it, she must have been daunted to be in his company. But Buffet chatted easily about a range of subjects and after a while Saima too began to unwind. Unknown to Saima at the time, he was a curry fiend.

“He asked me if I enjoyed food and I told him it was my passion,” Saima recalls. “So he asked me to recommend a good desi restaurant in New York. Stupidly, I said, ‘Why don’t you and your wife come to my place? I’ll cook for you.’ Having made the rash invitation, I reasoned that he was a busy man. When would he ever find time to come to my little apartment in New York? In any case, he’d probably forget this conversation in a day.”

"We were sending money to a few Aleppo contacts so they could build tandoors and bake fresh bread. Syrians are a proud people and they are entrepreneurial"

Saima returned to New York and put the incident out of her head. Two weeks later she received a phone call from Buffet’s private secretary to say, “Warren and Astrid would be pleased to take you up on your invitation to dinner and if possible, would like to bring along another guest”. Saima felt the floor slipping away from beneath her feet. “I thought to myself, ‘Is this a prank? Is this really happening?’”

On the appointed day she rushed home from work and spent the evening sequestered in her kitchen trying to create a meal worthy of the mighty Warren Buffet. Saima was tending to her steaming pots and pans when her excited friends who shared the house with her called out: “Hey Saima, you’ll never believe who’s coming up the stairs!” “I know, I know,” she yelped, “don’t remind me!” Hurriedly setting the table and whipping off her apron, she opened the front door to see not just Warren and Ingrid at her threshold but also Bill Gates. “Saima,” said Warren to his stunned hostess. “I hope you don’t mind but I brought Bill along. He also loves curry.”



I ask her what she cooked for the two billionaires that night. “I knew that Warren likes meat,” she laughs. “So I cooked chicken biryani, tarhka daal, achari gosht and I rolled out my own rotis. I cook really good chapattis. Bill kept asking for ‘makhan wali rotis’, as he has had them in Pakistan. I must have made a dozen fresh rotis for the four of us.”

During a subsequent chat with Buffet - she acknowledges him as an influential figure in her life - he asked her to recall a day of work that had been truly exciting. She found herself telling him about the dinner she’d had to cook the year before at short notice for forty people in London, turning a French menu into a Persian spread. “Well, then,” he said, “that’s what you should be doing full time.” His advice resonated with her, but still caught in the rat run, she didn’t want to take unpaid leave to consider her options. And then a person really close to her died. “That was it. I thought to myself ‘life’s too short’ and I decided to go for it.” She took six months off work and researched the market. She consulted her parents. They were solidly behind her. At the end of those six months her private catering company The Hampstead Kitchen was born and she moved back to London.

It is a niche business catering to a select clientele. “Most of my customers are well travelled and well established, who like my curated, private dining experiences.” And I guess they also value her discretion. When I ask her to name some clients, she tells me about her involvement, through Buffet, with The Giving Pledge - a group of billionaires like Zuckerberg and Bloomberg and others who pledge vast sums of money for charitable ventures around the world. At Buffet’s request she has catered for them in his hometown of Omaha and also at the White House. She tells me of well-publicised events like those, but does not name any of the well-heeled clients who employ her regularly but value their privacy.

Today, The Hampstead Kitchen employs a full-time staff of 30 and has more commissions than Saima can manage. Recently she catered for 500 guests at an exclusive wedding at the palace of Versailles in France. She also cooks regularly for a Middle Eastern king, both here in London and at his hometown. Clients send their private jets to collect her for their events. But more satisfying than anything else is the fact that she enjoys what she does. “Of course I continue to work very hard, but I work hard so that I can give more. As I get older, I am more reflective about how I fit into the world and of my greater purpose, not just for myself but the community around me.”

She is involved in fostering inter-faith dialogue between the Muslim and Jewish communities of North London. “Seventy percent of my clients are Jewish. It makes no sense to me that when we have so much in common in our cultures and religion, we should not have greater understanding.” So, once every two months, she organises lunch for the women of both communities where they meet and talk over her delicious food. Saima and her brother have donated a TCF school to her father’s village, Domeli. “Domeli,” she says, “gave up a son many years ago. We wanted to give something back.” She donates food regularly to charities for the homeless such as Shelter, Crisis and Mungo’s and auctions bespoke dinners for global charities for health and education. “I live and work in London,” she says, “so I don’t want to just focus on Muslim charities.” She trains ex-offenders and refugees as cooks and employs them in her company. She has contributed three recipes to the book, Cook for Syria, sales of which have already raised £150,000 for Syrian refugees. Saima’s recipe for a dish of labneh balls covered in herbs and nuts is the most recreated dish in the book.

So much for work and charity. What does she to do relax? What is her idea of luxury? “You really want to know?” chuckles Saima. “It is to come home after a long day at work, open my fridge and find that my parents have been around and left fresh food they’ve cooked just for me. They know my favourites - qeema, daal, kachoomar and paratha. My idea of heaven is to sit in my pyjamas on my comfy sofa and tuck into my parents’ home-cooked food. I think then of how lucky I am - I have work I love, I have a roof over my head, a fridge full of food and most importantly, people who care for me. What more could anyone want?”