Butter Chicken Tikka Masala

Tandoor-fired chicken in our tikka-masala / maakhni sauce

The name looks like a hedge. It isn’t. Most kitchens make you choose: butter chicken, where tandoori chicken goes into tomato, butter and cream; or chicken tikka masala, where the same tandoor-fired tikka meets a spiced tomato gravy. Ours is genuinely both at once, which is why it is called both.

It starts in the clay oven. Chicken is marinated and fired until the edges catch, and that char is not decoration — a sauce can only ever be as good as what you put into it, and poached chicken tastes like poached chicken no matter what it is swimming in.

The sauce takes the afternoon. Tomatoes go on early and reduce for hours, until they stop tasting like tomatoes and start tasting like something else entirely. Butter and cream come in at the end, off the heat, which is the maakhni half of the name doing its work. Six hours is not a boast. It is simply how long it takes for a tomato sauce to lose its edge and turn round and sweet.

The history is worth a minute. Butter chicken was invented in a Delhi restaurant in the middle of the last century to solve a practical problem: tandoori chicken dries out by the end of service, and a tomato-and-butter gravy brings it back to life. Chicken tikka masala has a murkier claim — Glasgow has argued for decades that it happened there. Both dishes solve the same problem the same way, which is why nobody can ever quite tell you where one ends and the other begins.

It arrives with saffron basmati rice and butter naan, and it is the dish most first-time tables order without reading further down the menu. We have called it arguably the best butter chicken in the city for years now. The word ‘arguably’ is doing less work than it used to.

The longer argument — Delhi against Glasgow, makhani against masala, and which name belongs to which pot — we set out at length in The Munkey Times.

Dietary & spice

There is dairy in it — butter and heavy cream — so it is not one for a dairy allergy, though it is one of the gentler dishes on the menu for heat. Most dishes here can be made milder or hotter to taste; tell your server. Our chicken and lamb are halal. The menu now also includes pork dishes — notably our Goan Pork Vindaloo — so the kitchen is not fully halal. If you keep strict halal, tell your server and we’ll guide you through the menu; there are also plenty of vegetarian dishes. The allergy menu lists every dish and what it carries.

Butter Chicken Tikka Masala.