Revisionist history has been rife in Indian politics for some time now; and so it seems only fitting that it should now also be present in the restaurant world. I am referring not to the many lies Indian restaurants put on menus about village recipes and chefs’ grandmothers but to a very specific and high profile controversy between two Delhi restaurants: Moti Mahal and Daryaganj. The name Moti Mahal may be familiar to you if you have read up on the history of North Indian restaurant food. It was founded in Daryaganj in Old Delhi in 1947 by three friends who had left Peshawar for Delhi during Partition. This is the restaurant at which the previous night’s tandoori chicken was recycled into a rich tomato gravy, thus giving birth to butter chicken (they also lay claim to dal makhani). This has been accepted history for some time now. Well, until 2019 anyway. That’s when a new restaurant named Daryaganj opened, which also claims to be the inventor of butter chicken and dal makhani. Now, you may be wondering how a restaurant that opened in 2019 can lay claim to dishes that everyone agrees another had been making since 1947. That’s where things get spicy. Read on.
As I mentioned, Moti Mahal had been founded in 1947 by three friends. The most prominent of the three and the one whose name everyone knew, lo these many decades, was Kundal Lal Gujral. He it was whose name was always attached to both Moti Mahal and the origin story of butter chicken. There was, however, another Kundan Lal in the trio: Kundan Lal Jaggi. He sold his interest in the restaurant in 1992 and passed away in 2018. As far as I know, he never challenged the Moti Mahal origin story while still breathing the polluted air of Delhi. So what changed? What changed is that in 2019 Kundan Lal Jaggi’s grandson and a businessman friend of his opened Daryaganj. Finding themselves short of a history separate from that of Moti Mahal, they proceeded to just claim that history and write Moti Mahal out of it. This is the story you can find in the rear of their menu. In their telling, in 1947 Kundal Lal Jaggi opened “a restaurant” in Daryaganj and proceeded to invent butter chicken and dal makhani. This restaurant, whose successes are acknowledged as K.L. Jaggi’s, is only referred to as “Kundan Lal Jaggi’s restaurant”. You can imagine how they feel: that restaurant was, of course, Moti Mahal. A bit inconvenient.
Anyway, they went full bore with the “inventors of butter chicken and dal makhani” thing, at which point Moti Mahal up and took them to court. After some years of legal back and forth I believe the courts ruled that no one can claim to be the sole originators of things like butter chicken or dal makhani. And so now both restaurants sport that claim prominently on their signage. At the M3M IFC complex in Gurgaon you can see this with your own eyes as there are outposts of Daryaganj and Moti Mahal a few hundred feet from each other. Daryaganj’s branding proclaims them “the inventors of butter chicken and dal makhani” and Moti Mahal ups the ante by dubbing themselves “the inventors of butter chicken and dal makhani” with a strategically placed “since 1920” below that line. Since Moti Mahal did not open till 1947 we are now well into the realm of temporal anomalies—who knows where/when the story will go next.
My favourite part of this saga is that when you enter the M3M Daryaganj through the main entrance (as we did) you will see a prominent black and white sketch (or so it appears) of a bunch of men standing in front of a restaurant; above them is a banner bearing the words, “Leads in Indian Dishes”. Now if you go to Moti Mahal you will see the same image in their menu, except now it’s a photograph (the original that Daryaganj has rendered as a sketch or whatever). Everything about the two images is identical except for one crucial thing that Daryaganj edits out in theirs: above the words “Leads in Indian Dishes” in Moti Mahal’s photograph is, yes, the name Moti Mahal, for that is the restaurant the men are standing in front of. (And, yes, a gallery of photographs of celebrities who ate at Moti Mahal in its heyday is reproduced on the walls of Daryaganj as “Celebrities Served by Mr. Kundal Lal Jaggi”.)
The funniest thing about all of this, of course, is that no one in Delhi really cares who invented butter chicken or dal makhani as long as there’s enough of it available.
Well, that’s a lot of words already and I haven’t yet got to the lunch we ate at the M3M location of Daryganj a few days after arriving in Delhi in July. And I’m afraid I’m not going to have too many words about it. That’s not because it wasn’t a good meal; it was. But there was nothing particularly remarkable about it. In the US this would be an outstanding North Indian/Punjabi restaurant; in Delhi it’s just another place slinging butter chicken and dal makhani (and the rest of their famous and popular kin). I will, however, tell you what we ate.
We started with an order each of the mutton seekh kababs, the chicken tikka and the tandoori chicken (half). The kababs were quite good; the tandoori chicken was just okay, I thought. For the mains we were denied butter chicken as they put cashew paste in theirs and the younger boy is allergic (we are hopeful he will grow out of it soon as his older brother did). Instead for meat we got the “sharaabi raan”, a leg of goat marinated with spices and rum (“sharaabi” means “drunk” in Hindi). Alongside it we got what they call “The Original 1947 Dal Makhani”, which I can tell you was quite good and which I can also tell you tasted just like every unoriginal 2025 Dal Makhani served in restaurants that make no claim on history. Also quite good were the saag paneer and the breads we got to go with it all: lachha parathas and naans.
Oh yes, the boys got mango lassis to start; the missus got a mango-citrus punch; and I got a glass of very good Mattha, a variant of spiced buttermilk.
For a look at the restaurant, the menu (and the marketing twaddle), and everything we ate, click on an image below to launch a larger slideshow. Scroll down for thoughts on service, to see how much it all cost and to see what’s coming next on the food front.
Service was very good. Yes, it’s true that we were eating lunch very early by Delhi standards (we’d arrived at 12.30) and so had the staff mostly to ourselves but they were good: attentive without being overbearing and very careful in checking with the kitchen about the allergy stuff (which is something we’ve learned to not take for granted in Delhi). And at the end when we asked if we could have the few pieces of pickled onion that we hadn’t eaten added to our bag of leftovers, they gave us an entire jar of it. Price? Rs. 6231 or just about $70 or about $17.50/head. That’s not a cheap meal in Delhi but is not out of keeping with prices at other restaurants of this ilk (the feel is pretty upscale). And keep in mind that we took a lot of food home; it was enough food for six people.
There are many locations of Daryaganj in the Delhi NCR, by the way. There are four branches in Delhi, two in Noida and three in Gurgaon (in addition to two delivery-only outlets). There’s also a branch in Ludhiana and even one in Bangkok. I take some amusement in the fact that none of Daryaganj’s Delhi locations is actually in Daryaganj.
What’s next on the food front? Tomorrow I hope to have a review from the Twin Cities: of our recent dinner at Tenant. My next meal report from our travels will be of lunch at, yes, the M3M location of Moti Mahal…