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ShareThe name is 'Anarkali' and I thought it to be too lofty a name for a dish that lorry drivers would order at the local dhaba. The ingredients match the name, the water used is Evian, the oil is olive and parmesan reggiano, French whipping cream, even black olives, are used as garnish.I believe he uses herbs but was not willing to disclose what they were, although I detected a little oregano.
However, the price is extraordinary, Rs6,000 for a serving for two people. He maintains that Rs4,200 is the cost of preparing the dish, and they feed 20 hungry people with the proceeds from the sale, presumably not this expensive butter chicken.
I had the butter chicken which was almost ambrosial and what was surprising was its lightness. He claims that it contains only 412 calories per serving as compared to 650 calories for a portion of bhel puri.
The taste was complex and as garam masala tends to smother flavour, this was checked by a rich subtle undertone emanating, I suspect, from the addition of parmesan. I was candid enough to tell him to invest so much time and energy into essentially dhaba food might be a wasted effort. But then again to reinvent something popular and basic represents a huge challenge.
But for me, butter chicken holds certain nostalgic associations. When I was studying for the Bar in London, I had acquired a Baby Belling Cooker with an oven.A favourite dish was the murgh makhani. The recipe was from an old and now, largely forgotten, book on Indian cookery, well-thumbed and splattered with spices, Indian Cooking by Dharamjit Singh (Penguin). His butter chicken recipe was a paragon of simplicity.
All you did was roast the chicken, there was no masala, only seasonings and bay leaves. The trick was to fold the ghee before it became brown into a large quantity of yogurt which was poured over the roasted chicken so that its juices would permeate the sauce.I then graduated to a Madhur Jaffrey recipe which I suspect owes much to the original creators of the dish, the Moti Mahal Restaurant in Dariyaganj in Old Delhi; it uses tandoori chicken but creates a sauce redolent of spice, garam masala, lal mirch, lemon juices, roasted jeera and half a pint of single cream, as well as 100gm of unsalted butter.
This is dhaba cuisine at its best -- velvety rich, tasty, value for money and leaves you with a heavy feeling in your stomach indicating that you have done rather well.What I would call the "burp" school of food appreciation.
For those who couldn't care less about the state of their arteries and want to eat the best butter chicken in Mumbai, there are the usual suspects such as Pritam Da Dhabba at Dadar and Great Punjab on Linking Road, but for South Mumbaikars, a place which offers a superlative butter chicken more subtle, aromatic than Kwality or Khyber is Gulmarg Restaurant at the Shalimar Hotel at Kemp's Corner. It is the closest to home cooking you are likely to come across and that, I suspect, is where the best butter chicken is to be found.
