Moti Mahal: India curry houses battle over butter chicken

Who invented butter chicken?

The velvety dish, made in a thick tomato-yoghurt gravy with rich notes of butter and mild spices, has inspired mystery novels, travelogues, and countless restaurant orders.

But the comforting curry that people from around the world turn to as a familiar favourite has now become the subject of a messy court battle.

A lawsuit over the dish's origins was filed in the Delhi High Court last week. The case involves two competing restaurants and families, each claiming a lineage with the city's renowned Moti Mahal restaurant founded in 1947, and each calling themselves the inventors of the popular dish.

The lawsuit - brought by the family of Kundan Lal Gujral, one the original restaurant's founders - claims that Gujral created the curry and has sued rival chain Daryaganj of falsely taking credit for it.

The Gujral family, which is seeking $240,000 (£188,968) in damages, has also alleged that Daryaganj has wrongly claimed it invented dal makhani, a lentil dish made with butter and cream.

But it's butter chicken that has dominated headlines.

There are countless versions of how butter chicken was invented, but all of them start with a man called Mokha Singh, feature three of his employees and involve at least three different restaurants located across the subcontinent.

The lore goes back to pre-Independent India and inside the dusty lanes of Peshawar (now in Pakistan), where a young Singh ran a popular restaurant called Moti Mahal, says chef and food writer Sadaf Hussain.

In 1947, when India was partitioned, Singh and several of his Hindu employees fled Peshawar and moved to the Indian capital. Soon they lost touch with each other.

Until one day, when three of them - Kundan Lal Gujral, his cousin Kundan