Who invented butter chicken? The real story, and how we cook ours

The dish is usually traced to Moti Mahal in Delhi in the 1950s, and to a cook named Kundan Lal Gujral, whose family had moved to Delhi from Peshawar around Partition. The restaurant sold a lot of tandoori chicken. Whatever didn't sell dried out by the end of the day.

So they simmered it in a gravy of tomatoes, butter and cream. That kept it moist and turned a problem into a menu item. The most famous Indian curry in the world was invented to rescue yesterday's chicken.

The tidy version has one inventor. The actual history is messier than that.

Moti Mahal was founded by more than one partner, and descendants of those partners now run their own restaurants making their own claims about where butter chicken and dal makhani were first cooked. In 2024 the dispute reached the Delhi High Court, when the company behind Moti Mahal sued the Daryaganj chain over competing claims to have originated the dish.

Two families, one kitchen in old Delhi, and a curry famous enough to be worth litigating over seventy years later. I'm not going to pretend to know who's right. What nobody disputes is the where and roughly the when: Delhi, the years after Partition, a tandoor, and a pot of tomatoes and butter.

Butter chicken travelled because it's rich without being difficult. It doesn't demand a high spice tolerance. People who find a lot of Indian food too hot can still eat it happily, and anyone who wants more heat can add it themselves. It works with rice. It works with bread. And it's hard to get badly wrong once the gravy is right.

That combination made it the dish that introduces most people to North Indian food, and the one they keep ordering long after they've stopped being new to it.

People treat them as interchangeable. They aren't. Butter chicken is a tomato reduction finished in cream, so it comes out smooth and slightly sweet. Tikka masala starts from a fried onion base, runs looser, and usually carries more heat.

The origins differ too. Butter chicken is Delhi, reasonably well documented even with the family dispute. Tikka masala's story points at Britain, and is contested in an entirely different way. I pulled the two apart properly in butter chicken vs chicken tikka masala.

We start with real tandoor char on the chicken. That smoke is half of what stops the dish being just a creamy curry. The gravy is a tomato base cooked down slowly and finished with butter and a little cream, balanced so it stays rich without going heavy or sweet. The same slow-cook logic runs our dal makhani, for what it's worth.

Ours is on the menu, cooked after you order rather than held in a warmer. It's the mildest thing on our menu and one of the most ordered, which is exactly what butter chicken has always been good at. If you want the longer version of what separates a real one from an orange impostor, I wrote a full guide to judging butter chicken.