[Delhi, India] Dinner at the historic Moti Mahal, Daryaganj

[klyeoh (Peter)]

@fooddabbler

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 really envy you - you’d experienced Moti Mahal during its hey-days. I’d also read about old-timer Delhi-ites who reminisced about how amazing Moti Mahal’s food standards were at the beginning, how upmarket and deluxe the whole place was, and how it all started sliding even by the 70s!

@fooddabbler

One of the myths in the book is that Kundan Lal Gujral invented tandoori chicken

I agree with you. I think “invented” was probably used very loosely there, but it certainly made for good publicity!

@fooddabbler

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.

I read somewhere that Moti Mahal was the first restaurant in Delhi to have a tandoor oven within its premises. Maybe that was what made it so special back in 1947 when it started off.

When I was on a business trip to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan a few years back, I noticed the similarities between their culinary culture and North-east India’s “frontier cuisine”: tandoor was known as “tandir” there, samosa = samsa, naan = non, pilau/pilaf = plov, etc.

In fact, the Kazakhs, Uzbeks, and their Central Asian brethren were likely part of the Mongol hordes which invaded early China, and introduced noodles to the Chinese, as far back as the Tang Dynasty (6th-century AD). In Kazakhstan & Uzbekistan, their “lagman” noodles were identical to our “la mian” in Chinese cuisine.