I ate at the original Moti Mahal a couple of times in the mid-1970s. The open-air courtyard was less crowded then, and more gracious than in the photos above. I liked the food a lot, but I was just a youth. What did I know? Since then I’ve eaten at MMs in several locations in several cities and they’ve generally been solid.
The restaurant has led to a myth-making book: Moti Mahal’s Tandoori Trail (by Monish Gujral, Roli Books, 2004). One of the myths in the book is that Kundan Lal Gujral invented tandoori chicken, a myth repeated in Culinary Biographies: A Dictionary of the World’s Great Historic Chefs, Cookbook Authors and Collectors, Farmers, Gourmets, Home Economists, Nutritionists, Restaurateurs, Philosophers, Physicians, Scientists, Writers, and Others Who Influenced the Way We Eat Today (talk about mouthful of a title).
I was skeptical of that claim and looked into it some years ago. The entry under “Tandoor” in Alan Davidson’s Oxford Companion to Food discusses the history of the oven and the origin of its name. The linguistic origin appears to go back to Babylonian times, and the clay oven itself seems at least as old as a thousand years. It was probably a bread oven originally, but meats also seem to have always been cooked in it.
In the new translation by Charles Perry of Kitab al-Tabikh (published by Prospect Books under the title A Baghdad Cookery Book), a 13th century Arab cookbook, there’s a whole chapter largely on chicken cooked in a tandoor. These tandoori chickens were stuffed with various things, colored with saffron, and cooked over flat dough that absorbed the drippings. We see not only tandoori chicken in its infancy here, but also Yorkshire pudding.
Gujral may still lay claim to the particular spicing used for his version of tandoori chicken, but not for being “the first to come up with the idea that a whole chicken could also be cooked inside the tandoor.” However here’s an innovation that he can, apparently, legitimately claim (this is from the MM book, and remember the era this is from):
