Butter chicken, Indian comfort food that unites cultures – its history, and how today’s chefs use social media and TV to promote it to the world
- The result of a culinary experiment at a roadside restaurant, butter chicken quickly spread throughout India to become arguably the nation’s favourite dish
- Decades after its invention, Indian-born chefs promote the curry everywhere from the US to the UK, using Facebook groups and TV shows like MasterChef Australia
A few months back I invited a few colleagues to my home for dinner to celebrate a milestone at work. Initially I was unsure about what to order, but since I was having them over the first time, butter chicken was the natural choice.
Between platefuls of basmati rice and buttered naan bread, the five of us polished off two boxes of the velvety dish. We may all be from different parts of India and have our own preferences when it comes to food, but we were all united over our love of butter chicken.
“It has loads of butter and loads of cream. What is there not to love?” says Monica Bhide, author of the novel Karma and the Art of Butter Chicken, for whom butter chicken evokes nostalgia.
“My dad travelled a lot but when he was home, he would cook butter chicken,” she says.
In its purest form, the dish is one of yogurt- and spice-marinated meat, prepared using onions, ginger, and tomatoes, and scented with garam masala, cumin and turmeric.
In restaurants, it is often cooked in a tandoor – a large, urn-shaped oven – giving it a deep, caramelised flavour. The generous amounts of butter and cream used make it wildly luxurious.
It’s a dish that works for everyone – from kids to adults to grandparents.
“It’s a dish least likely to become leftovers at gatherings. It makes people happy and touches a sweet spot,” says Amninder Sandhu, founder of Ammu, a delivery kitchen in the Indian metropolis of Mumbai, and award-winning chef who was a contestant on Netflix’s global culinary contest The Final Table.
Sonia Sarkar, an independent journalist based in the Indian capital, Delhi, believes that butter chicken is meant for special occasions.
“As a newcomer to Delhi in 2004, when I earned only 7,500 Indian rupees a month, I kept some money for butter chicken – for a date or for treating a friend. But much later, in 2014, I had butter chicken at Aslam [a restaurant in central Delhi that is famous for the dish], which had melted butter poured over roasted chicken, and fell in love with it. My ex-colleague took some of us there and we devoured it,” she says.
The dish was invented by Kundan Lal Gujral, an entrepreneur who ran a roadside eatery in Peshawar (in present-day Pakistan).
Not knowing what to do with the leftover tandoori chicken that his restaurant was known for, he is said to have dunked small pieces in a tangy-sweet tomato sauce.
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Thanks to the copious amounts of butter used in its preparation, he named the creation butter chicken.
Within a short period of time, numerous restaurants selling the dish had sprung up throughout the country. Butter chicken spread like wildfire, its reassuring familiarity making it a staple of Indian restaurants, with its sweet, comforting flavours suiting even the most sensitive of palates.
“It’s a dish that works for everyone – from kids to adults to grandparents,” Sandhu says.
Back in 1948, Moti Mahal was popular not only with the general public but also with celebrities and various heads of state. Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, is said to have been so impressed with the butter chicken at Moti Mahal that it became a permanent fixture at all his state banquets.
“Former American president Richard Nixon, the king of Nepal, former Soviet politician Nikolai Bulganin, everyone loved our food,” says Monish Gujral, grandson of Kundan Lal Gujral and founder of Moti Mahal Delux Tandoori Trail, a franchise of the original restaurant.
In 1990, Kundan Lal Gujral received the IATO (Indian Association of Tour Operators) award for inventing tandoori chicken and butter chicken. Today, there are over a hundred franchises of Moti Mahal around the world, with one set to open next month in North Carolina, in the United States.
“People come and blindly order the butter chicken. It is difficult to get them to try anything different,” wrote Monish Gujral in his 2009 book, A Moti Mahal Cookbook: On the Butter Chicken Trail.
A copy of the book was given to patrons – along with a discount on butter chicken – to celebrate the centenary of Moti Mahal in 2020.
Leslie Brenner, who served for many years as a restaurant critic for the Dallas Morning News, a newspaper based in the US state of Texas, interviewed Monish Gujral in April 2020 for her food blog Cooks without Borders, and proposed the idea of instituting a World Butter Chicken Day.
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October 20 was chosen by Gujral as de facto World Butter Chicken Day as it is the birthday of his son, Gunav, who closely resembles his great-grandfather Kundan Lal Gujral.
Gujral’s is not the only name synonymous with butter chicken. Saransh Goila is another chef who is well known for his version of the Indian favourite.
Goila won a cooking competition – Food Food Maha Challenge, on Food Food, an Indian TV channel – at the age of 25. This triumph led to him hosting a travel programme showcasing regional Indian cuisine.
It was while exploring different parts of India, covering some 20,000 kilometres (12,400 miles) in the process, that the chef realised butter chicken had a universal appeal that transcended India’s diverse cultures. With this in mind he decided to launch the world’s first global butter chicken brand.
He set up his first cloud kitchen in Mumbai in June 2016, and its butter chicken was well received.
Two years later, in 2018, he was invited by then-MasterChef Australia judge George Calombaris to be a guest on the hit show, with contestants asked to recreate his signature dish.
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In 2020, at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, Goila set up a delivery kitchen in London at an experimental dining space called The Carousel, before opening a second outlet in the English capital’s Shoreditch neighbourhood in 2021.
The secrets to Goila’s recipe are the all-important infusion of smoke, the tomato-to- dairy ratio (80:20 as opposed to the usual 60:40) and his insistence that only the absolute best ingredients make it into the pot. The chef describes his dish as “a hug in a bowl”.
Dallas-based Urvashi Pitre, a food blogger raised in Pune, in western India, is yet another butter chicken specialist – she is known online as “the butter chicken lady”.
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In March 2017, she posted a butter chicken recipe on the Instant Pot Community Facebook group, a community dedicated to the handy cooking appliance, with over 3 million members. Not only did her post become one of the group’s most popular, but within a few months Pitre had landed a book deal, and released Indian Instant Pot Cookbook in September that year.
Today, you can find many spins on butter chicken – from tacos to pizzas to rolls, and burgers to biryani.
Nora, a restaurant in Pune that was founded by Sandhu, serves butter chicken kulcha (a type of leavened flatbread) with rocket leaves, pickled vinegar onions, coriander sprigs, and hung curd dip.
The butter chicken comes on top of the kulcha and can be scooped up easily.
“I don’t think a menu is complete without butter chicken. I feel that we have many great dishes in India, but butter chicken is the greatest of them all,” Sandhu says.
Goila, too, offers novel takes on this traditional dish at his London outposts, with butter chicken biryani, a butter chicken burger, chips with butter chicken gravy, and even a butter chicken khichdi – a traditional Indian rice-based dish – on the menu.
Little did Kundan Lal Gujral know when he invented butter chicken that he was creating history.
