Butter chicken vs chicken tikka masala: two dishes, one common mix-up

Butter chicken has a reasonably documented origin. Moti Mahal in Delhi, the 1950s, a pot of tomatoes and butter invented to rescue unsold tandoori chicken. Who exactly gets the credit is still disputed between two families, and in 2024 that dispute reached the Delhi High Court. I wrote the whole story out in who invented butter chicken.

Tikka masala's origin story usually points at Glasgow rather than India. The version most often told involves a chef at a Scottish curry house in the 1970s, a customer who complained the chicken tikka was too dry, and a tin of tomato soup thinned with spices. It's a good story. It's also contested, and plenty of cooks argue tikka masala is simply butter chicken adapted to British tastes and British tinned goods.

What isn't in doubt is how thoroughly Britain adopted it. In 2001 the UK Foreign Secretary called it a true British national dish in a speech. In 2009 a Glasgow MP tried to win it protected origin status in Europe, the way champagne has. That bid failed, which tells you how shaky the paperwork behind the story really is.

The base is the fork in the road, and everything else follows from it.

Butter chicken's gravy is a tomato reduction. You cook tomatoes down slowly until they stop tasting raw and start tasting sweet on their own, then butter goes in for richness and cream goes in at the end for silk. Tikka masala starts with onions fried down properly first. Onions bring savoury depth and body rather than tang.

That single choice explains the rest. Butter chicken ends up sweeter and smoother because the tomatoes did the work. Tikka masala ends up savoury and looser because the onions did. Tikka masala also usually carries more garam masala and more paprika, which is doing double duty as heat and as colour.

The one thing they genuinely share is the chicken. Both start with pieces marinated and cooked in a tandoor, and in both dishes that char is what stops the whole thing tasting like a cream sauce. That shared step is exactly why people confuse them.

Straightforward, mostly:

• You want rich and mild with no surprises: butter chicken.
• You want more masala and some actual heat: tikka masala.
• You're feeding someone new to Indian food: butter chicken, every time. It's the dish that has been doing that job for seventy years.
• You want the gravy to stretch across a lot of rice: tikka masala, because the looser gravy goes further.

Neither is the more authentic choice. One is a Delhi restaurant's fix for leftovers and the other is probably a Glasgow kitchen's fix for a dry plate of chicken. Both were invented to solve a problem in a hurry, which is how most good food happens.

Worth being straight about that, given the whole post led here. It isn't on our menu and it isn't going to be. Our recipes come from the founder's family kitchen in Amritsar, and tikka masala isn't part of that. That's not a judgement on the dish, just an honest answer about what this kitchen actually knows how to cook.

What we do make is butter chicken, marinated overnight and cooked after you order. That's the whole trick. No tinned soup anywhere. If you want to know how to tell a real one from the sweet orange version, the full guide to judging butter chicken is the longer answer.

And if what you actually wanted from tikka masala was the masala and the heat rather than the cream, the closest things on our menu are masala paneer or the punjabi masala chicken fry. The chicken fry is the spicier of the two by a distance.