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Over three decades of teaching cooking classes in the Greater Toronto Area, Arvinda Chauhan and Preena Chauhan have tried many times to remove butter chicken from their schedule to make room for more diverse options from across India. But each time they do, the requests come flooding in.
“After seeing all these responses, we decided that this class would always be featured as one of Arvinda’s signature cooking classes, as it really is so many people’s favourite Indian curry to cook — and to eat,” the mother-daughter duo writes in their 2022 cookbook, New Indian Basics.
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Butter chicken (murgh makhani) is a beloved tandoori specialty enjoyed at Indian restaurants worldwide. While no one is questioning its appeal, Reuters reports a dispute around its origins has reached the Delhi High Court.
The family behind the Delhi restaurant chain Moti Mahal — where India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, once dined — has sued rival Daryaganj. In addition to being legally recognized as the inventor of butter chicken, the Gujral family is seeking $323,860 in damages and alleges that Daryaganj has copied “the look and feel” of its restaurants and website.
The Gujrals claim that their grandfather, Moti Mahal founder Kundan Lal Gujral, created butter chicken in the 1930s in Peshawar, present-day Pakistan, before moving the restaurant to the Daryaganj district of Delhi during Partition in 1947.
According to their account, Gujral came up with the dish while working as a cook at a roadside dhaba (truck stop) in Peshawar. The spot was known for its tandoori chicken, and, looking for ways to use leftovers, Gujral started simmering it in a butter-rich tomato sauce with cream and dried fenugreek leaves.
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“You cannot take away somebody’s legacy … The dish was invented when our grandfather was in Pakistan,” Monish Gujral, the managing director of Moti Mahal, told Reuters.
Delhi restaurant chain Daryaganj, established in 2019, has claimed that a member of its founding family, the late Kundan Lal Jaggi, invented the original butter chicken recipe (and dal makhani, for that matter) after partnering with Gujral to open Moti Mahal in Delhi in 1947.
“(Raghav Jaggi, grandson of Kundan Lal Jaggi) called his chain Daryaganj after the original location and added the description, ‘By the inventors of butter chicken and dal makhani,’” according to the Hindustan Times. Daryaganj successfully trademarked the name and tagline in March 2018.
Intellectual property expert Shikha Sachdeva of Delhi law firm ASM Law Practice, who isn’t involved in the case, told the Hindustan Times that she’s never seen anything like it. Adding to its complexity, “As nobody seemed to be disputing that the dish was created at Moti Mahal, the Court had to decide which of the partners played the larger role in its creation. But, given that everything was credited to the restaurant as a whole and not to individuals, it would be hard to tell, so many decades later, what really went on in the kitchen.”
The next hearing will occur in May in what must be the most succulent case to hit India’s courts.
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