On Tuesday I posted a brief report on lunch at one of the Gurgaon outposts of the North Indian restaurant, Daryaganj. Most of the post was in fact taken up with their battle with the more established restaurant, Moti Mahal, specifically over the ownership of the claim to have originated butter chicken and dal makhani. You can (re)read that post to catch up on the saga but the key facts are these: Moti Mahal was founded in 1947 by three partners, one of whom, K.L Gujral was long-identified with the restaurant and credited as the inventor of butter chicken. The grandson of one of the other partners, K.L Jaggi, opened Daryaganj with a partner a year after his grandfather’s death (and 27 years after he’d exited Moti Mahal) with the marketing claim that it was in fact his grandfather who’d originated butter chicken and dal makhani, thus claiming that history for his new restaurant. A court case later both restaurants are now claiming to have done so. At the M3M IFC complex in Gurgaon they’re doing so within a few hundred feet of each other and 10 days after eating at that branch of Daryaganj we went back to M3M and ate at Moti Mahal. Revisionist/competing historical claims aside, which did we like better? Read on to find out.

One of the things you will notice if you visit Moti Mahal after Daryaganj is that while Daryaganj is claiming on their menu that they serve the “Original 1947” versions of butter chicken and dal makhani (neglecting to mention, of course, that those originals were actually served at Moti Mahal), Moti Mahal has since upped the ante by claiming their origins go all the way back to 1920 or 27 years before Moti Mahal was even founded and well before Partition, which brought both K.L Gujral and K.L Jaggi from Peshawar to Delhi, was even a thought that had occurred to anyone. The claim they make on their menu is that this was when K.L Gujral began his culinary career. They’re not explicitly claiming that butter chicken and dal makhani were invented by their founder in 1920—this would be at odds with the story they’ve themselves told since 1947—but the “Since 1920” that sits right below the words “Inventors of Butter Chicken & Dal Makhani” on their signage might give a different idea to people not reading closely.

The other thing you might notice when you enter the restaurant is that as the established one in this fight, Moti Mahal doesn’t make as much noise about their history as the upstart Daryaganj—who have the problem that the history they are claiming is actually Moti Mahal’s—does inside and outside their restaurant. I can’t speak to the other branches, but at M3M Moti Mahal displays a few old photographs outside the restaurant’s entrance and says a little bit about legacy on their menu and that’s about it. Oh yes, as I mentioned in the other report, while Daryaganj claims to serve “The Original 1947” versions of various dishes on their menu, Moti Mahal trumps them by claiming to serve “The Original 1920” versions of those dishes. I can only hope this amuses someone at Moti Mahal’s management as much as it amuses me. I can only hope that the Daryganj braintrust is hard at work coming up with a way to take their story back to K.L Jaggi’s toddler years (he was born in 1914) or perhaps even earlier to his grandfather’s time. I don’t want to give anyone ideas but 1857 has a nice ring to it.

Okay, back to our lunch at Moti Mahal at M3M. It’s a brighter restaurant than the M3M Daryaganj and the interior design manages somehow to be both blingy and attractive at the same time. We were given a large table and quickly got down to business. Our order resembled the one we’d placed at Daryaganj in many particulars. The boys started with mango lassis and, while they don’t offer it on their menu, they made me a very nice chhaas/spiced buttermilk (and charged it as a salted lassi). We got a half tandoori chicken, an order of mutton seekh kababs and an order of chicken tikkas here too to start. The boys were thrilled to discover that their butter chicken does not contain cashews (Daryaganj’s does, which means they don’t actually use the same recipe) and so we got an order of that along with an order of dal makhani. At Daryaganj we’d got saag paneer for the veg and here we got a khumb/mushroom tikka masala. So a very orange order. Oh yes, quite a few garlic and butter naans to eat everything with. I got an order of very nice gulab jamun to end—this was another major point in Moti Mahal’s favour as at our lunch at Daryaganj they had not had any sweets on offer for some reason.

The food was all very good. There was not a whole lot of difference between the renditions of the dishes in common at our meal at the two restaurants but, on the whole, we liked the food at Moti Mahal a little bit more and if we had to go back to one or the other it would therefore be to Moti Mahal.

For a closer look at the restaurant and everything we ate, launch the slideshow below. Scroll down to see how much it all cost and to see what’s coming next.

Service had been very good at Daryaganj and it was very good here as well. Price? Rs. 6163 or just about $72. Slightly cheaper than our almost identical meal at Daryaganj but that’s almost entirely due to the fact that the missus did not have a fruit juice here.

Anyway, I don’t really have a stake in these silly butter chicken/dal makhani wars—though I do hope they’ll keep going as it’s very amusing indeed—and, really, neither Moti Mahal nor Daryaganj is offering anything particularly out of the ordinary in Delhi. The many, many Punjabi restaurants that the original Moti Mahal begat in its image in the decades between 1947 and now all offer more or less the same fare and I doubt professional taste testers could really pick between competing versions of the famous dishes at most of these places. Which of them you choose to go to really comes down to location and price. And when two are within a few hundred feet of each other (and also the location of Anardana we ate at in 2024), I guess you flip a coin.

Alright, next up on the food front will be a Seoul report or two. Next week’s Twin Cities report will be of upcoming lunch at Grand Szechuan.