A recipe can cross borders, survive migration, pass from mother to daughter and, centuries later, find its way onto a completely different table. That idea lies at the heart of the culinary encounter between Asma Khan and Sinem Özler.

Khan, whose extraordinary journey from Kolkata to London has made her one of the world’s most influential chefs and Özler, has dedicated her work to reviving forgotten Anatolian dishes and cooking techniques. She recently brought their two culinary traditions together in Istanbul.

Now, they are taking that conversation to Tokat.

With the support of Doğan Yıldırım, the founder of an Istanbul restaurant, the two chefs will embark on a documentary project exploring Tokat’s culinary memory and the centuries-old routes through which people, ingredients, techniques and stories moved across Anatolia.

Two cultures, one table

Some dishes do more than satisfy hunger. They tell the story of a migration, a family, a city – and sometimes of societies that lived thousands of miles apart for centuries.

A dinner held at an Istanbul restaurant recently brought together two such stories. Khan and Özler brought the culinary memories of two distant geographies together in a nine-course collaborative menu.

Around 150 guests attended the evening. At the end of the night, a photograph of nearly 40 members of the kitchen and service teams standing together offered a glimpse of the often invisible labor behind the meal.

Tomato raita was served alongside imam bayıldı, a Turkish dish of eggplant braised with onions and tomatoes, while fish cakes met chutney and lor-filled chard dolma. Özler’s içli köfte shared the table with Khan’s chicken biryani, a recipe she learned from her mother.

Özler’s zirva, a lamb dish inspired by Ottoman cuisine and prepared with dried fruit, met Khan’s richly spiced culinary tradition, revealing how close two seemingly distant gastronomic traditions can sometimes be.

What came together in Istanbul that night was more than two chefs.

It was the meeting of two women’s memories, two home kitchens and two great civilizational spheres separated by thousands of miles.

Invisible road

It would be misleading to view Indian and Anatolian cuisines as two entirely separate culinary worlds. Though thousands of miles apart, the two regions were, in different ways, part of the vast trading systems that connected Asia, the Middle East and Europe for centuries.

Much of what we now call "local cuisine” is, in fact, the product of movement.

People moved. Merchants moved. Armies, migrants, dervishes and travelers moved. And with them traveled seeds, spices, fruits, grains, cooking techniques and recipes.

That is why the history of gastronomy must be traced not only through kitchens, but also along roads.

Culinary crossroads: Anatolia

To understand the richness of Anatolian cuisine, one first has to look at the map.

For thousands of years, Anatolia was not only a land where civilizations rose and flourished, but also one of the world’s great historical crossroads, linking Asia and Europe, the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, Mesopotamia and the Balkans.

From the Persian Royal Road and Roman routes to Byzantine roads, Seljuk caravan routes and the Ottoman relay system, Anatolia was constantly in motion.

By the Middle Ages, the region had become one of the most important western extensions of the Silk Road network. Caravans arriving from the east reached Sivas through Erzurum and Erzincan, from where routes branched out in different directions.

One route passed through Tokat, Amasya and Kastamonu toward Istanbul. Another ran through Kayseri, Aksaray and Konya toward the Mediterranean ports of Antalya and Alanya, while other routes connected Ankara, Bursa, Iznik and Istanbul.

Ports including Trabzon, Samsun and Sinop in the north, Izmir and Foça in the west, and Antalya, Alanya and Antakya in the south connected these land routes with maritime trade across the Black Sea and Mediterranean.

Anatolia was not defined by a single road, but by the meeting of many roads.

The ancient trading network we now call the Silk Road carried far more than silk.

For centuries, spices, grains, oils, honey, precious stones, glass, fur and countless other goods moved along its routes. Alongside merchandise, ideas, beliefs, techniques and everyday habits traveled between East and West.

Maritime routes stretching from the Indian Ocean to the Persian Gulf and Red Sea formed another vast system of exchange, carrying Indian spices into West Asian and Mediterranean markets.

Cinnamon, black pepper, ginger, cardamom and other spices traveled alongside rice, sugar and a variety of agricultural products, eventually finding their way into both markets and kitchens.

When an ingredient arrived in a new geography, it was reinterpreted through the local climate, beliefs, tastes and available ingredients.

Perhaps that is why drawing firm boundaries between the world’s cuisines is not as easy as it seems.

From biryani and pilaf to sherbets and halva, from the pairing of meat with fruit to the association of spices with healing, traces of centuries of interaction between India, Persia, Central Asia, Mesopotamia and Anatolia can be found across a vast culinary landscape.

Cultural stations

The caravanserais built along Anatolia’s roads during the Seljuk period were much more than places where merchants spent the night.

They were, in many ways, international meeting points of the medieval world.

People arriving from China, Iran, Syria, Iraq, the Caucasus and Mediterranean ports crossed paths there. Merchants speaking different languages stayed in the same courtyards, traded in the same markets and, at times, gathered around the same table.

The caravanserai system established by the Seljuks along Anatolia’s major trade routes helped secure commerce while also accelerating cultural exchange.

And wherever cultures met, cuisines learned from one another.

That is why it would be incomplete to define Anatolian cuisine simply as the sum of products grown in Anatolia.

It is, in the truest sense, the sum of the traces left by the people who passed through it.

Story of the 2nd daughter

What makes Khan’s story compelling goes far beyond her success as a world-renowned chef.

Born in Kolkata in 1969, one of the first turning points in Khan’s life came with her birth as the second daughter in her family. She would later speak openly about the disappointment surrounding the birth of a second girl in Indian society. The experience left a lasting mark on her and became one of the sources of her later advocacy for women.

When she married in 1991 and moved to Britain, Khan did not know how to cook.

Then came the strange emptiness that migration can create in a person’s memory. She missed her home, her childhood and her family. Among the things she missed most was food.

That was how she began learning to cook.

Perhaps the key to Khan’s power in the culinary world lies there. She did not learn to cook in order to build a career in a professional kitchen. She learned to cook to find her way back home.

Not geographically, but through memory.

From law to kitchen

Khan’s biography bears little resemblance to that of a conventional chef.

She studied law and earned a doctorate in British constitutional law from King’s College London. Eventually, however, she chose the kitchen over academia.

She began by hosting small dinner gatherings at her home in London. In 2017, she opened her own restaurant, but what set her kitchen apart was not simply its food.

It was entirely staffed by women.

Many of them were not professional chefs in the traditional sense. They were women who had migrated to Britain from South Asia and learned to cook not in culinary schools, but from their mothers, grandmothers and home kitchens.

In doing so, Khan posed one of gastronomy’s most important questions: Why should the culinary knowledge a mother accumulates over 40 years be considered any less valuable than a diploma from a culinary school?

Today, Khan’s London restaurant is an established name in the city’s culinary scene. But she has never viewed it simply as a place whose sole purpose is to serve food.

The dishes prepared there pay tribute to the matriarchs of home kitchens around the world, bringing invisible labor into view.

In almost every country, women have traditionally carried much of the responsibility for cooking at home, while the top positions in professional kitchens have long been associated with men. That contradiction lies at the heart of Khan’s work.

For her, the kitchen is also a space where women can gain economic independence.

Greater visibility for women in the workforce, the economic participation of migrant women, food justice and the fight against hunger are all integral to her work in gastronomy.

That work eventually gained international recognition.

TIME magazine named Khan one of the world’s 100 most influential people in 2024. Her story also reached Netflix, where she appeared in the sixth season of the acclaimed documentary series "Chef’s Table," becoming the first British chef featured on the program.

In 2022, the United Nations World Food Programme appointed Khan as a chef advocate. Through that work, she has highlighted the relationship between the fight against global hunger and the empowerment of women.

A story that began in Kolkata as that of a second daughter had traveled through London and reached the United Nations.

Biryani for the palace

Khan’s guests have included figures ranging from Hollywood stars to members of the British royal family.

King Charles III and Queen Camilla visited Khan’s restaurant in 2025 for an event ahead of Ramadan highlighting the contributions of British Muslim women to society. They joined Khan in preparing biryani and date packages for people in need.

Khan has said that King Charles also took a portion of her biryani back to the palace.

The dish served at the Istanbul dinner was Khan’s "Mother’s Chicken Biryani.”

A recipe that began in a mother’s kitchen, traveled from Kolkata to London, reached the table of the British royal family and eventually arrived in Istanbul is, in itself, a story about how food travels across cultures.

Cooking Anatolia’s past

There is a surprising parallel in the story of Sinem Özler, the chef on the other side of the table.

She, too, did not come from a conventional culinary background.

After graduating from Istanbul University’s Advertising department, Özler spent nearly a decade working in advertising. Her life changed in 2015 when she crossed paths with Doğan Yıldırım.

She initially joined the business in a managerial role before gradually taking responsibility for the kitchen.

Today, Anatolia lies at the center of Özler’s culinary approach.

Seasonality, local produce, reducing waste and bringing forgotten recipes back into view form the foundation of her work.

That is why the meeting between Khan and Özler was more than a collaboration between two successful chefs.

Their common ground is memory.

One makes visible the knowledge passed from woman to woman through the home kitchens of India, bringing it into the international culinary world. The other gives forgotten Anatolian recipes a contemporary voice.

Next stop: Tokat

Against this broader historical backdrop, the next destination for Khan and Özler takes on a deeper meaning.

Tokat is not an isolated culinary island. It was one of the important nodes in the vast network of trade and cultural exchange that connected East and West, North and South, across Anatolia for centuries.

Historical routes arriving from Erzurum and Sivas opened toward the Black Sea and western Anatolia through Tokat and Amasya, while other routes connected the region with Kayseri, Konya and the Mediterranean.

To tell the story of Tokat’s cuisine, then, is in some ways to tell a small but remarkably rich chapter of Anatolia’s culinary memory – a memory shaped by journeys.

Khan and Özler will now trace that memory.

The documentary project will record lesser-known dishes from Tokat and its surrounding areas, local ingredients, producers, recipes preserved in women’s memories and cooking techniques passed down through generations.

Role of geography

At its heart, the question Khan and Özler will explore in Tokat applies to cuisines around the world:

How does a geography create its own food?

The answer lies in more than recipes.

It is hidden in climate, soil, rainfall, trade routes, migration, wars, periods of abundance and scarcity, preservation techniques developed by women, winter preparations, wedding tables and marketplaces.

Anatolia is one of the world’s strongest examples of this process.

The olive oil of the Mediterranean met the grains of central Anatolia. The livestock traditions of eastern Anatolia encountered the spices of Mesopotamia. The produce of the Black Sea met culinary traditions arriving from Iran and Central Asia.

For centuries, these influences crossed paths across the region.

That is why a meaningful food documentary can be much more than a cooking program.

Cultural mission

For years, Türkiye’s gastronomic image abroad has often focused on a relatively small number of well-known dishes and products. Yet the real strength of Anatolian cuisine lies precisely in its local diversity.

A recipe preserved in a home kitchen in Tokat but little known even in Istanbul, a method maintained for generations by a producer in Niksar, a local product from Zile or a cooking technique kept alive in the memories of women in villages can all become part of Türkiye’s international culinary story.

First, however, they have to be found, documented and told to the world through the right stories.

Having an internationally recognized figure such as Khan explore local Anatolian cuisines alongside Özler could become an example of gastronomic diplomacy and contribute to Türkiye’s culinary prestige and cultural outreach.

After all, a recipe known by a mother is also cultural heritage.

A cooking technique maintained in a village, a region’s way of making bread, a spice blend, winter preparations, a wedding dish or a holiday table are all parts of a cultural memory worth preserving.

Sometimes preserving heritage does not mean putting it in a museum.

Sometimes it simply means writing down a recipe before it disappears, recording the story of the person who makes it and showing it to the world, keeping it alive.

‘Open every door for women’

Perhaps the most important moment of the Istanbul evening was not on the plates, but in Khan’s words.

Speaking about women’s participation in economic and social life, Khan delivered a simple and direct message: "Open the doors for women ... open every door.”

Those few words perhaps capture the essence of her story.

Because what Khan has done is not simply opening the door of the kitchen to women. She has shown migrant women without professional training, second daughters, mothers and grandmothers whose years of cooking at home were never considered a "profession” that another door was possible.

Now, one of those doors is opening toward Anatolia – and toward Tokat.

On one side are the spices of Kolkata, the memory of Bengal and the stories of migrant women in London. On the other are Anatolia’s thousands of years of roads, caravanserais and marketplaces, its wheat, bulgur, fruit, meat and cooking pots and the recipes passed from mother to daughter for generations.

The journey of Asma Khan and Sinem Özler may ultimately remind us of one of gastronomy’s simplest yet most powerful truths: food is never just what we eat.

Food is geography. It is migration, trade, women’s labor and memory.

And sometimes, the shortest road connecting two places thousands of miles apart is simply to sit down at the same table.