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Delhi gets skipped. Travelers land at IGI, eat one hotel buffet, and fly to Jaipur or Agra thinking the real food is elsewhere. They’re wrong. No other Indian city had its cuisine rewritten the way Delhi did after 1947, when Punjabi refugees opened tandoors in Daryaganj and invented half the dishes the world now calls “Indian.” Layer that on top of Mughlai cooking handed down from the Bahadur Shah Zafar era around Jama Masjid and the chaat-and-kebab street tradition that runs from Chandni Chowk to Karol Bagh, and you get a city where the best Delhi food lives in one specific lane, one specific kitchen, one specific family that’s been at it for four generations.
This is the ultimate Delhi food guide, and the honest answer to what to eat in Delhi, and where.
Why Delhi Food Tastes the Way It Does
Before the dishes, the context. Delhi food is three streams stacked on top of each other.
Stream 1 – Mughal court food. When the British deposed Bahadur Shah Zafar and the Mughal Empire ended, the khansamas who had cooked for emperors needed work. Some of them, including the family that founded Karim’s in 1913, opened public restaurants near Jama Masjid serving simplified versions of imperial recipes. That’s why Old Delhi’s Muslim quarter is still one of the places where you eat the best kebabs in India. The recipes are 400+ years old and the restaurants are only 100+ years old.
Stream 2 – Partition-refugee Punjabi food. When India was partitioned in 1947, millions of Punjabis from Lahore, Peshawar, and Rawalpindi crossed into Delhi as refugees. They brought their food with them: chole bhature from Lahore, tandoori chicken from Peshawar, the entire vocabulary of “Punjabi food” as the world now knows it.
Stream 3 – Old Delhi (Shahjahanabad) Brahmin and Marwari food. The older lineage. Pre-Partition, mostly vegetarian, often run by single families for four to six generations. The bedmi puri at Shyam Sweets. The pure-veg parathas at Paranthe Wali Gali. This is the food Old Delhi has been eating since Shah Jahan’s time.
A guide to Delhi food that skips any of these streams is missing the point. Below are the dishes and shops that matter.
Butter Chicken
If you eat one thing in Delhi, eat this, and eat it at the place where it was invented. Usually I say stop ordering butter chicken everywhere you go in India because there’s so much more to try. Here I make an exception.
Butter chicken (murgh makhani) is a tomato-cream-butter curry built around tandoori chicken pieces, and it’s the most globally famous Delhi food invention. It was born at Moti Mahal in Daryaganj in the late 1940s, created by three Peshawari refugees who’d opened the restaurant together after Partition.
The accidental-invention story is the good part. The kitchen had no refrigeration. At the end of every night, leftover tandoori chicken pieces would dry out by morning. To save them, someone started simmering them in a tomato-butter-cream gravy: soft enough to revive the dried meat, rich enough to hide the day-old flavour. Within a decade it was on every restaurant menu in north India. By the 1970s it was the signature dish of every “Indian curry house” in London and New York.
The original Moti Mahal is still on Netaji Subhash Marg in Daryaganj. The chain has expanded, but the Daryaganj location is the canonical one. Other butter chicken contenders worth knowing are Minar Restaurant, locals’ pick for “Dilli ka butter chicken” with an old-school CP dining room, and Havemore, open since 1959, with award-winning butter chicken, classic preparation, and the family-and-government-lunch crowd.
Tandoori Chicken
You can’t write about Delhi food without acknowledging that tandoori chicken was also a Kundan Lal Gujral invention, slightly earlier than butter chicken. He developed it before Partition at the original Moti Mahal in Peshawar, where he worked alongside his future Delhi partners Kundan Lal Jaggi and Thakur Dass Mago.
The innovation: the tandoor (clay oven) was traditionally used only for baking naan and roti. Gujral started skewering yogurt-marinated chicken pieces and sticking them inside. The high temperature charred the outside, the yogurt kept the inside juicy. The result is the smoky, slightly crisped, deep-orange chicken that’s now ubiquitous from Delhi to Manchester to Toronto.
The dish was so revolutionary that Pandit Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, made Moti Mahal’s tandoori chicken a fixture at his state banquets after Partition. Jacqueline Kennedy was photographed eating “Chicken Tandoori”. The dish became one of the original cultural exports of post-independence India.
Chole Bhature
If you want to understand what Partition did to Delhi food, eat chole bhature.
The dish came from Lahore. Punjabi refugees opened chole bhature stalls across Paharganj, Karol Bagh, and Kamla Nagar. Within a decade, it was Delhi’s defining street food. Spiced chickpea curry (chole) plus deep-fried puffed bread (bhature). Heavy, rich, eaten as breakfast or brunch, rarely dinner. One plate is a meal.
The two worth mentioning here are Sita Ram Diwan Chand (the original Lahori recipe, since 1950) and Rama Chole Bhature (the roadside favourite of cricketer Virat Kohli).
Chole Kulche
Chole kulche is what you eat when you want chole bhature but lighter.
Same chole. The kulcha is a round, leavened wheat flatbread baked in a tandoor or on a tawa, softer than the deep-fried bhatura and served straight off the heat. More of a street snack than a meal. Best places to eat are Lotan Chole Kulche and Ashokji Matar Kulche in chandani chowk.
Dal Bukhara
If you do one fine dining meal in Delhi, do this one.
Bukhara is at the ITC Maurya Hotel in Diplomatic Enclave. The cuisine is North-West Frontier (Pathaan/Punjabi) that inlcudes kebabs, dal Bukhara (a slow-cooked black-lentil dal that’s worth flying to Delhi for), tandoori naans the size of small umbrellas, Sikandari Raan slow-roasted overnight. The dining room has stone walls and log-top tables. The kitchen is open. You watch chefs skewer tandoor-cooked meat in real time.
This is the most internationally celebrated address in Delhi food. Bill Clinton ate here on his March 2000 India trip, and the kitchen still serves the “Presidential Platter” he ordered (Sikandari Raan, Murg Malai Kebab, Tandoori Jhinga, Dal Bukhara). Hillary Clinton followed in 2009 and got her own “Hillary Platter.” Putin, Schwarzenegger, Federer, and Sachin Tendulkar have all eaten here.
The signature gimmick is no cutlery. You eat with your hands. Diplomats, billionaires, first-time tourists, all the same. They give you a giant bib (the “Bukhara apron”) to keep the gravy off your shirt.
Mughal Kebabs
Karim’s, in Gali Kababian near Jama Masjid, has been operating since 1913.
The lineage is royal. The story starts with Mohammed Aziz, a cook in the royal kitchens of Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar in the mid-1800s. His son Haji Karimuddin opened Karim’s in 1913, serving the recipes that had once been cooked for emperors, at prices the common man could afford. That decision is one of the foundational moments of modern Delhi food.
Today, 110+ years later, Karim’s is run by the fourth generation of the family. They still cook on charcoal. They still use the same recipes. The location is still a tangled lane behind Jama Masjid. Order the Mutton Burra, Seekh Kebab, Mutton Korma (with sheermal), Chicken Jahangiri, and Rumali roti. The burra is yoghurt-marinated and slow-cooked, the seekh is charcoal-grilled minced lamb, the korma is the deep-spiced one, the jahangiri is the royal almond-ghee chicken, and the rumali is the handkerchief bread.
Karim’s is the charcoal-Mughlai school. The slow-melted, perfumed cousin is 500 km east in Lucknow, where the Awadhi nawabs ran a parallel court cuisine from the 1720s onward. That kitchen invented the galouti kebab for the toothless Nawab Asaf-ud-Daula in the late 1700s, then the kakori kebab and the dum-style Awadhi biryani. Same family tree, different branch. For more details, read the Lucknow Food Guide.
Daulat Ki Chaat
If you visit Delhi in winter, eat this. Outside winter months, the dish doesn’t exist. It’s the most fleeting item in Delhi food.
Daulat ki chaat is a dessert made from sweetened milk and cream churned for hours overnight, exposed to dew and cold air. The combination of low temperature and slow agitation produces a foam (light, airy, almost cloud-like) that’s garnished with saffron, crushed pistachios, sometimes khoya, and a dusting of powdered sugar. It dissolves on your tongue. It tastes like sweet cold air.
The dish doesn’t survive heat. As soon as the temperature rises, the foam collapses back into liquid. That’s why it’s a winter-only specialty, and why the same idea has different names in different cities like malaiyo in Varanasi. The Varanasi version is covered properly in the Varanasi Food Guide.
There’s no single famous shop, because daulat ki chaat lives on the cart, not the menu. Look for vendors with wooden thelas covered in fine muslin cloth, with blocks of ice underneath the brass thaal. It’s one of the most distinctive desserts in India. Worth telling people about for years.
Parathas and Lassi
Gali Paranthe Wali (“Lane of paratha sellers”) is a narrow alley in Chandni Chowk that has been making stuffed parathas since 1872. It’s one of the oldest continuously running addresses in Delhi food.
The first shop was Pandit Gaya Prasad Shiv Charan Paranthe Wale, opened in 1872 after Pandit Gaya Prasad relocated from Agra. He was Brahmin, so the parathas were strictly vegetarian and no onion, no garlic. The clientele included the Jain families of the surrounding neighbourhood. The lane caught on. By the late 1960s there were around 20 paratha shops in the same alley, all branches of the same extended family. Today, three remain. The stuffings go far beyond what most parathas elsewhere offer and includes Aloo (potato) – the classic, Paneer (cottage cheese), Mooli (radish), Gobhi (cauliflower), and many more
Each paratha is shallow-fried in pure desi ghee in a kadhai (deep wok), which gives it the distinctive crisp shell that sets it apart from the tawa cooked Punjabi-style paratha. The thali that comes with it includes a spicy aloo sabzi, a mash of sweet pumpkin (kaddu), tamarind chutney, mint chutney, mixed-vegetable pickle, and a slice of banana.
Pair the parathas with a kulhad (terracotta cup) of sweet lassi. It has chilled curd, a generous spoon of malai (cream), and serve it thick enough that the spoon stands up in the cup. The cold sweetness cuts through the ghee and the chilli of the thali, and resets your palate between bites. Skipping the lassi here is a missed half of the meal.
Bedmi Puri and Aloo Sabzi
This is the Old Delhi breakfast, and one of the most enduring rituals in Delhi food.
Bedmi puri is a deep-fried bread made of wheat flour mixed with urad dal and spices. Aloo sabzi is a hot, gingery, slightly tangy potato curry. You tear the puri with your right hand, dip it in the aloo and eat. You also order nagori halwa alongside (small puffy semolina puris served with a cardamom and saffron flavoured semolina pudding), which is the sweet course of the same breakfast.
The classic place is Shyam Sweets. The shop was established in 1920 by Babu Ramji and is now run by fourth-generation Sanjay Agarwal. Jawaharlal Nehru was reportedly a regular in the 1940s. This is the breakfast Delhi has been eating for 100+ years. It’s heavy. It’s perfect.
Buttermilk and White Butter Sandwich
This is a secret in Old Delhi, and one of the most underrated stops in Delhi food.
Jain Pavitra Chhachh Bhandar is a tiny shop in Chandni Chowk in a side lane that most foot traffic walks straight past. It sells two things salted lassi (chhachh, or buttermilk), and white-butter sandwiches, which are a slab of fresh hand-churned makhan inside two slices of bread, served plain.
The buttermilk is salted and seasoned with toasted cumin and rock salt. The bread is fresh. The butter is unsalted, hand-churned that morning, intensely creamy. Most tourists never find it. Most Delhi residents have never heard of it. That’s part of the point.
If you ate at Shyam Sweets in the morning, walk here for second breakfast. Or come straight here if you want something light before a long Old Delhi food crawl.
Final Thoughts on Delhi Food
Delhi food deserves more credit than it gets. Eat slowly. Cross all three streams of the city’s food. Don’t be the tourist who only eats at the hotel. Pick one big-ticket fine-dining meal and multiple nondescript Old Delhi institutions, and do them all.
Come hungry. Pin this guide for your Delhi trip.
