The story of how Britain's National Dish, chicken tikka masala, was invented in a Glasgow restaurant

This is the story of chicken tikka masala - and how it was invented right here in a restaurant in Glasgow. Ali Ahmed Aslam was a chef in Glasgow’s West End, owner and proprietor of Shish Mahal Gibson Street. The restaurant is still open although it moved to Park Road.

Known to friends and regulars as Mr Ali, he moved to Glasgow from Pakistan as a young boy - but it wasn’t until 1964 when he opened up Shish Mahal at the age of just 18 years old.

Indian restaurants were springing up all across Britain though Glaswegians palates hadn’t quite become accustomed to the aromatic flavours of Indian cooking.

Glasgow had become a much more multi-cultural city since the age of the British Empire, but rationing had just ended 10 years prior when meat was taken off the ration in 1954.

Scots were used to pretty bland dishes, as much as we love mince and tatties and pies, there’s a big jump from traditional Scottish dishes to the flavourful and colourful curries we enjoy nowadays.

The innovative chef was always looking to please his customers. A beacon of hospitality, Ali was constantly listening to feedback from regulars, and in the 70s when he had heard from a few Glaswegians that the traditional chicken tikka was too dry, he set about making a new sauce for the British palate.

While we loved the spices, Glasgow wasn’t prepared to have meat without gravy, a sentiment many Glaswegians will probably empathise with to this day.

The original sauce was invented on the fly, when Ali added a tin on condensed tomato soup to the mix in an effort to make the dish a bit more ‘wet’. The sauce was developed over time to include yoghurt, tomatoes, garlic, cream, ginger and other traditional Indian spices.

In an interview with the AFP news agency, he described the moment he came up with one of Britain’s favourite dishes, saying: "Chicken tikka masala was invented in this restaurant, we used to make chicken tikka, and one day a customer said, ‘I’d take some sauce with that, this is a bit dry’

"We thought we’d better cook the chicken with some sauce. So from here we cooked chicken tikka with a sauce that contains yoghurt, cream, and spices. It’s a dish prepared according to our customer’s taste, usually they don’t take hot curry, that’s why we cook it with yoghurt and cream."

It’s such a point of pride for people here in the city that former Glasgow MP Mohammed Sarwar once tabled a motion in the House of Commons for the dish to recognised as a national delicacy, with the point of origin rightfully listed right here in Glasgow.

That being said, there are several chefs and historians that dispute this origin story. World food historians Peter and Colleen Grove believed that the dish was first conceived in a recipe for ‘Shahi Chicken Masala’ in Mrs Balbir Singh’s Indian Cookery book published in 1961, 3 years before Shish Mahal even opened. Although the recipe was quite different from the modern style, and even the method first used by Aslam in the 70s, which to us seems more of an originator than anything else.

Other chefs take the origins of the dish even further back. Owner of popular Indian restaurant chain Moti Mahal, Monish Gurjal, said his grandfather was serving chicken tikka masala to Indian politicians and dignitaries as far back as 1947.

Ali Ahmed Aslam passed away at the age of 77 at the end of 2022, but he has gone down in history as one of the brightest and most innovative chefs to have ever come out of the city. Right up until the end of his life he still served up the dish he created to customers in the restaurant, his nephew, Andleeb Ahmed, said that hospitality was his passion, and that’s what he loved doing more than anything else.

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