Would I spend Rs 6,000 for Anaarkali’s two-person portion of gourmet butter chicken? To put this into perspective, for that kind of cash I could buy nine bars of Amedei Porcelana cacao chocolate, a tiny spoonful of Iranian Almas caviar, three to five cups of Kopi Luwak coffee, or about one pound of Wagyu beef.
For most of us, splurging on gourmet food is only partly about sensual indulgence — the real thrill, if we’re honest, is the childish pleasure of spending that much money on something as perishable as food, as personal and ephemeral as taste. I’d pay a lot for the experience of a luxurious, once-in-a-lifetime meal created by a master chef — but would I pay an astronomical sum for something that is, all said and done, a superior form of the TV dinner?
Anaarkali packages its butter chicken in a microwaveable Borosil dish with a really fancy lid, and ornate black wrapping. The website of the Hyderabad-based home delivery venture offers a list of ingredients: Hunt’s tomato paste, Evian water, Lurpak butter, edible gold and silver leaf, Godrej chicken, Filippo Berio olive oil, and (this makes butter chicken purists erupt) Kraft parmesan cheese powder. It’s a 12-hour cooking process. It’s a recipe that builds on the classic, but is taken to perfection, according to chefs Padma Prasad and Iran Bharat Saxena, and I can’t believe I’m seriously thinking of ordering myself a portion.
There’s a moral dilemma here, a resistance to spending money frivolously that probably infects all of us who grew up in the austere years of Nehruvian socialism. I have an ethical problem, much to my surprise, about spending 6K on butter chicken for two — even though I can see how this could become the amusing Christmas and Diwali gift of 2009 for a certain kind of person. This is not a logical reaction. I have no qualms about spending outrageous sums of money on lunch at Wasabi; the last meal we had at Varq cost well over Rs 10,000 for two people; and I have been known, confronted by almond-stuffed olives or caramelised onions or rare cheeses and Parma ham, to lose my head completely in delis. (It helps to hand your credit card over to a friend before you walk in.)
So why does the Rs 6,000 butter chicken stick in my craw? A friend in Hyderabad ordered it and thought it was a great idea, even if he had to arrange for the naans separately. (That’s Rs 6,050 for dinner, people.) Anaarkali’s chicken was tender, had just the right blend of spices, and was smooth — a playful version of the dhaba classic. But that’s not why he thinks it was a great idea. He served it at dinner, to impress his lady of the moment, and this is why he thinks it’s a great idea: “It’s cheaper than the kind of jewellery she likes. And ummmm. It worked. If you know what I mean.” The price tag as aphrodisiac — not a new concept, but elegantly reworked.
If Anaarkali had marketed its Rs 6,000 butter chicken (for two) under a different name — poulet a la Indienne, Sunheri Murg — would I really care? Probably not. Rs 6,000 for an Indian gourmet food product, including air freight charges, isn’t as extravagant as it sounds, given that some of Delhi’s most diligent party-goers would spend five times as much as that on flying down crab and jumbo prawns from Goa if required. But I find myself going to Moti Mahal, where butter chicken was invented by a harried chef who took marinated chicken one busy evening and threw together an inspired sauce, and ordering their famous, feted (if sometimes challenged by contenders) butter chicken.
This is the grand original, and I eat it with their garlic naans, getting my hands dirty, sopping up that awesome, triple cardiac bypass gravy. It brings back the taste of butter chicken eaten off a steel plate on the Punjab highways, of the terrible buffet butter chicken dripping in oil, glowing carcinogenic red that appears at cheap weddings, of a perfect butter chicken served with thick rotis rather than naan in a dhaba in Nepal.
This is the way butter chicken was meant to be eaten. Straight out of the kitchen, where Rs 500 would get you enough to feed the family, without olives or gold leaf, and with hot-from-the-tawa naans.
I like Anaarkali’s chutzpah (despite the Parmesan cheese). I might even gift their butter chicken to a friend in need of a laugh, or a seduction aid. But I’m sticking with the Rs 230-500 unreconstructed dhaba classic, all the same.
