Khana owner Maryam Khan is busy at work behind the counter of the Congregation making butter chicken sandooris and coconut curry lettuce wraps. The Pakistani fusion food pop-up has been taking over the coffee shop’s kitchen for a few days a month since January.
Khan is coming off of a run on season 16 of Food Network’s The Great Food Truck Race, with Khana coming in second place. And before you ask, no, Khana is not a food truck, but they have been popping up around Detroit since 2018 with recipes inspired by Khan’s Pakistani heritage.
Khan has dreamed of being on the Food Network since she was a teenager so getting the call to compete on The Great Food Truck Race was a literal dream come true. Sometimes getting what we ask for comes with a few unwanted side effects, however.
For many viewers, Khan was the villain of the season. The controversy came mostly because Khan fired one of her teammates, Jake Nielsen, on camera after episodes of infighting and a communication breakdown. Since Khana was left with only two members, Khan was allowed to bring in former competitor Carl Harris from The Block food truck, which had been eliminated episodes earlier.
It was the first time someone had ever been fired from the show on camera and that a team was allowed to replace a lost member.
Viewers have trashed Khana on social media since the show, leaving negative reviews despite never trying the food. “The Khana girl is arrogant and it’s off putting,” one commenter writes on a Reddit thread. “I absolutely cannot stand them,” writes another. “The main girl is a toxic bully, the tattooed team member [Al Jane] kisses her ass in a way that makes me die a little inside, and their whole vibe is so negative and mean. Really hoping they don’t win. Their behavior is shitty.”
“The show came out and it was a nightmare,” Khan says. “If you go on our Facebook page, we used to have a five-star rating and [now] it’s like a 2.3 because it’s all strangers who watched the show being like, ‘I would never eat here, it’s horrible,’ and I’m like, you’ve never even tried it! It’s so whack.”
Khan declined to go into detail, but says Nielsen was dealing with some heavy personal issues that were causing him to be preoccupied and detached. She says she tried to talk to him several times to reach a resolution off-camera, but it eventually became clear that it just wasn’t working out. Khan felt that if Nielsen stayed on the show, his inability to work with the team was going to get them sent home.
“He had a lot of things going on in his personal life that he had brought on himself and was projecting them on everyone on the show,” she says. “But people chalked it up to what they had witnessed on the 30 seconds of what TV aired from like a two-week situation… Food Network is catered toward people who want things to be simple and easy. They don’t want to see a brown girl who is in charge firing a white man.”
Despite the haters, Khana’s popularity seems to have skyrocketed back home in Detroit since coming off the show. In addition to the takeovers at The Congregation, which Khan hopes to do monthly, Khana also has its first-ever multi-course dinner at Frame on Friday. Khan is also setting her sights on opening a brick-and-mortar in Detroit by the end of the year.
When Khan first started Khana back in 2018, she wasn’t quite sure where her life was going and felt a little lost. She has had a passion for food since she was 16, however, and decided to get creative with the recipes she grew up eating in her Pakistani household. Khan is a first-generation American born in Detroit to immigrant parents.
For Khan, the pop-up has been a way to reconnect with her Pakistani identity, which is something that she struggled with as a first-generation American, especially during the surge of Islamophobia post-9/11.
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“I had all these creative ideas for making some fun twists on [Pakistani food] that I had never quite seen as someone who loves eating out and eating food from different cultures,” she says. “Our first pop-up ever blew up. We had a line down the hallway at Kiesling. We popped up on their patio and we sold out within a matter of hours. We’ve been asked by so many businesses across Detroit to come in and do pop-ups ever since. That was around the time that pop-ups were gaining traction but now I feel like they’re a lot more commonplace.”
One of Khana’s staple menu items is the butter chicken sandoori, a fried chicken sandwich drenched in spicy butter chicken sauce. There’s also Chana masala tacos and an aloo gobi burrito, which is a potato and cauliflower dry stew in a burrito.
For Khan, the pop-up has been a way to reconnect with her Pakistani identity, which is something that she struggled with as a first-generation American, especially during the surge of Islamophobia post-9/11.
She explains that prior to 9/11, she was a devout Muslim who wore a hijab but abandoned the religion because she felt it was “divisive.” She also realized that she had never questioned religion before as she grew up Muslim, and wanted to decide her beliefs for herself.
“Seeing that kind of hatred made me hate myself,” she says. “I was attending an Islamic school at that time and the school had to be evacuated and shut down for a week because it was full of Muslim women wearing headscarves and it was like, we’re a target now. I remember one of my teachers was shot at at a gas station.”
She continues, “I distanced myself from that entire part of my personality and I started finding out there’s not a lot of answers to these questions that I have… so I denounced religion and at that point, I really resented everything that was part of my identity of being a Pakistani woman. And that was a struggle because then I grew up, moved out of my parents’ house and was very much focused on being like every other American person.”
Moving out also made her miss her parents’ cooking so she began trying to recreate traditional Pakistani dishes, though she admits her mother was an incredible cook and she could never mimic her recipes exactly. So she began experimenting, inspired by Detroit’s multicultural food scene.
“I was able to give new meaning to being Pakistani,” she says. “It opened up a completely new wave of feeling like, I don’t have to have this superimposed religious view on life that’s passed down through generations. I can have my own relationship with being Pakistani, being non-religious, but also having a sense of tradition that isn’t tied into some of the toxic things that are expected of women, particularly, in this culture.”
Food allowed Khan to foster a relationship with her heritage outside of religion. She remembers being bullied in middle school by white kids who would call her racist names and feeling ashamed, but now she’s proud of her Pakistani roots.
“They would say horrible things… like I’m Hindu one day and it’s shitty or I’m a Muslim terrorist the next day and it’s shitty, and all I wanted to do is just be like these kids,” she remembers. “But now I’m so glad I'm this person from a heritage and a culture that’s so beautiful and has so much rich history and depth and spans multiple countries. Pakistan hasn’t even been around for 100 years, like our roots go back to India, which is also beautiful.”
While Khana didn’t win The Great Food Truck Race and received a lot of hate afterward, it’s also gained fans worldwide. Of course Detroit is always going to root for Detroit, but Khan says she’s gotten tons of messages from people asking her to come to Dubai, Australia, and Canada.
“I’ve been getting a lot of love globally from South Asians who found out about us from word of mouth through the show,” she says. “The people who wanted to hate us got the opportunity to hate us but the people who were open minded saw the vision of what we’re trying to do. We were dedicated to putting our names out there and being like, yo, Pakistani food is dope [and] Pakistani identity is not like what it used to be… It was really cool to have the platform to share that with so many people.”
She continues, “It would have been sick to bag a win for the South Asian community, for people of color who are underrepresented… [but] even though there was so much negative backlash, ultimately I would do it again.”
For now, Khan is focusing on 2024. So far, The Congregation pop-ups have been two nights with one night featuring a fully vegan menu though Khana always offers vegan options.
While Khan is still trying to secure funding for the brick-and-mortar, she says she hopes to have a location by the end of the year.
“It feels like the right time to do it,” she says, “I want to take Khana to the next level and open a brick-and-mortar that is beyond just an eatery. Khana has always been more than just a food pop-up. We’ve worked with local DJs and I have tons of talented friends who make music and art. I’d love to have a space that embraces that side of Detroit that is so multifaceted and yet connected. We just have such a dope, deep network in Detroit and I want Khana to be a hub for all of that.”
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