butter chicken

Butter chicken has a known inventor and a known address: Kundan Lal Gujral, founder of Moti Mahal restaurant in Daryaganj, Delhi. Sometime in the late 1940s or early 1950s, Gujral began adding butter and tomato to the cooking juices left in the tandoor to prevent unsold tandoori chicken from drying out overnight. The result — murgh makhani, literally 'butter chicken' in Hindi — became one of the most replicated dishes in the world. Makhani means 'with butter' in Hindi, from makkhan, the word for fresh butter.

The Hindi makkhan descends from Sanskrit roots for the fat skimmed from churned milk. Butter has been used in South Asian cooking since at least 1500 BCE — the Rigveda refers to ghee, clarified butter, as something close to sacred. What Gujral did in his Daryaganj kitchen was bring fresh butter rather than ghee into a tomato-based sauce, creating a milder, silkier vehicle for the tandoor-cooked chicken. The English name 'butter chicken' is a direct calque of murgh makhani.

Moti Mahal's fame grew rapidly after 1947, when partition sent thousands of Punjabis into Delhi and the restaurant became a gathering point for displaced families. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was a regular. Richard Nixon ate there in 1969. By the 1980s, butter chicken was appearing in Indian restaurants from London to New York, and the orange-red, cream-finished sauce had become a template for British-Indian cooking.

In 2022, a Delhi court began hearing competing claims from the descendants of Kundan Lal Gujral and a rival restaurateur, Kundan Lal Jaggi of the Daryaganj restaurant, both asserting invention rights over murgh makhani. The case was unprecedented — no other dish has been litigated over its origin at this level. The judge dismissed both claims in 2024, ruling that the dish belongs to the public domain. Butter chicken remains, definitively, everyone's.