Moti Mahal's Butter Chicken : Take your Tastebuds on a Tour through Time
Walking through the doors of the iconic Moti Mahal in Daryaganj is like stepping into a time machine that transports you back to the early days of independent India. The light pink arched doorway features an old-fashioned navy blue sign that has the photo of a chicken (yes, a literal chicken) and the words “Moti Mahal” in a script that has been lost to modern typography. It leads you inside the restaurant, whose quiet and dated ambience is accentuated by its pastel-pink walls, softly decorated tables with plastic flowers and simple maroon tablecloth, reminiscent of an era before the many fancy cafes of Greater Kailash or the grand 5-star hotels of Chanakyapuri opened up. Just like its interior, the restaurant is well past its prime, as up till the 1970s it was the star attraction of Dilli’s cuisine, frequented by political personalities such as Nikita Khruschchev, Maulana Azad, Jawaharlal Nehru and Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, but soon was outshined by other eateries that popped up across the city.
Like many food joints that opened in Dilli during independence, Moti Mahal traces its history back to pre-partition India. Mokha Singh Lamba was the owner of an eponymous restaurant in Peshawar, founded in 1920. The two protagonists of our story - Kundan Lal Jaggi and Kundan Lal Gujral, worked as waiters in the original Moti Mahal, while the third protagonist, Thakur Dass, owned a wholesale pulses and rice business on the same road. The four of them were forced to shut down the restaurant and abandon their homes in 1947, when the partition of British India meant that Peshawar was now to be administered by Pakistan, and like millions of other refugees, they shifted their base to Dilli. Mokha Singh Lamba was hard hit by the loss of his home during the partition, and did not have any interest in continuing the business in the new city. He gave the new owners permission to use the name and logo of the original establishment. Thus, Kundan Lal Jaggi, Kundan Lal Gujral and Thakur Dass, having bought a small piece of land in Daryaganj, established Moti Mahal in 1947, that would come to define the city’s cuisine and eating culture for decades to come.
Kundal Lal Gujral (pictured) claims to have concocted several popular dishes of North Indian cuisine, such as butter chicken, tandoori chicken, dal makhani and gatti pulaao. This piece is an ode to the butter chicken (only because I am yet to savour the rest of their menu), and by extension, will include a tiny tale on the chicken tandoori.
First, let us travel back in time to Peshawar of colonial times. Gujral eventually rose the ranks of the original Moti Mahal, and by the late 1920s, was promoted to a senior chef. When he was asked to think of a lighter preparation of the bird, which otherwise usually featured in heavy gravy-based dishes, he invented the tandoori chicken by, as the name suggests, cooking chicken in the tandoor. The tandoor, which is a clay oven powered by either wood or charcoal, has been used for centuries to cook bread such as naans or rotis. The usage of the tandoor to cook chicken, which was marinated in dahi, lemon and spices was a stroke of genius that spread its wings from Peshawar to reach all across North India.
Let’s come back to Dilli. At the time, the shop did not have effective refrigeration facilities. Preserving raw chicken was an issue, as it could not be kept uncooked for a long while. And tandoori chicken could not be kept alone for a long time either, as it has a tendency to get dry if left unconsumed. To prevent leftover chicken from going wasted, Gujral whipped up a rich gravy made of tomatoes, butter and fresh cream. Leftover tandoori chicken was to be cooked in this gravy, and the smokiness of the chicken and sweetness of the gravy intertwined to lead to a wonderful invention that became known as “butter chicken” - a dish that over the years, has spread its wings far from the narrow lanes of Daryaganj, to an extent that now, one can make the argument that it is the most celebrated piece of Punjabi and Dilli cuisine.
Moti Mahal serves its butter chicken in a modest steel dish with a simple garnish of chillies and lemon, the plating matching the retrograde look and feel of the restaurant. Five of us ordered half a plate of the boneless variant between us, accompanied by a couple of butter naans. The charm of this delicacy is the way it manages to fuse a vast range of contradictory flavours in a single serving. If it were possible to relish the taste of a Beatles song, one where the slow sitar and tambura are joined by a hair-raising electric guitar solo, only to be eventually washed out by the roll of the drums and a choir lead by McCartney’s soothing voice, this would be it. The smokiness of the green chillies hits you at first, followed by a brief moment of appreciation for how juicy the chicken tastes. The sweetness of the gravy, which is a blend of tomatoes, butter, cashews, Kashmiri red chilli powder and a couple of other spices, provides a wonderful contrast to the chicken, with the occasional burst of fenugreek helping to blend the flavours together. And just as a Beatles song is elevated by a piano that softly keeps playing in the background, the dish is uplifted to a heavenly degree by the texture of the gravy, it being smoother than a knife cutting through butter, much thanks to the cream and butter that accompanies the tomato puree. While much of the above praise can be extended to butter chicken in general, one may note that it is the quality of the ingredients and the application of a decades-old technique at Moti Mahal that heightens the dish from its counterparts, and in my limited experience of having butter chicken across Dilli, I would say that the preparation of the meat at Moti Mahal, in particular its smokiness imparted by the tandoor, leads to a taste being curated that is found nowhere else on the globe.
This piquant coalescence of ingredients was the feather in the cap of Dilli’s cuisine up till the late 1970s. There may be no dignitary who has visited Dilli but has not visited the restaurant, with the likes of Richard Nixon, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Amitabh Bachchan, Indira Gandhi, Pierre Trudeau, Alexei Kosygin, Nikolai Bulganin, Nikita Khrushchev, Jawaharlal Nehru, Maulana Azad, the Shah of Iran, the King of Nepal, John F Kennedy, Vijay Mallya, Homi Bhabha, Zakir Hussain and so on being patrons of Moti Mahal in the past. In fact, Jawaharlal Nehru was so fond of their fare that he allotted an area adjacent to the original shop so they could expand their business. Eventually, the restaurant fell out of favour with its old clientele. As the city expanded its borders, newer and fancier eateries sprung up in areas more accessible to the city’s elite than the congested, polluted and unclean lanes of Daryaganj. This was marked by a change of ownership by the turn of the decade. Thakur Dass had long left in the 1960s after a spat with the Gujral family. The Gujrals and the Jaggis continued to run the restaurant for around a decade, having involved their sons in the family business as well, but they eventually decided to sell it off. The shop is now owned by Vinod Chadha, who bought the restaurant in 1991. The original restaurant in Daryaganj claims to have no other branches, but there are various other outlets operating both in Dilli and elsewhere that go by the same name, often with a suffix to differentiate it from the one in Daryaganj, such as the many “Moti Mahal Deluxe” outlets spread out across the city. A handful of these outlets are run by impersonators and others are franchises run by the descendants of the Gujrals and Jaggis.
This outlet is an intangible part of Indian heritage, culinary or otherwise. But if you’re not a person who cares about any of that, the food is worth the trip to Old Dilli for. In case my 1400 word review has not convinced you, perhaps the words that Maulana Azad once uttered to the Shah of Iran may.
“Coming to Delhi without eating at Moti Mahal would be like visiting Agra without seeing the Taj Mahal''.
Recommendations : Butter Chicken (9.5/10).
While I’m sure the rest of the menu would be scrumptious as well, and I implore the reader to order whatever they find appetizing, I’ve not had anything outside of their butter chicken yet, hence am not going into specific recommendations outside the Butter Chicken.
Location : 3704, Netaji Subhash Marg, Old Dariya Ganj, Daryaganj, New Delhi, Delhi 110002
