Butter Chicken
The national dish of Punjab and Delhi is butter chicken. Tandoori chicken (if you are faithful to the original), tart tomatoes cooked down and blended with rich cream for a tangy, smooth pulp where the spices are secondary to the sauce – it is devilishly difficult to nail the recipe perfectly.
Gulati in Pandara Road manages to do it quite well: the sweetness of the cream never overpowers the tomatoes that are never bland. The Big Daddy of butter chicken is Mughal Mahal in Rajinder Nagar. Competitors live in hope of uncovering some secret stash of canned Pelati tomatoes in their store room, but no luck so far: the sourness never varies! The progeny of Gulati have, thanks to Covid, developed a brand called Yours Truly Butter Chicken with no fewer than seven variants of the same theme! Yes, that is how fanatical we are about our national dish, hereabouts.
