An unnecessarily deep rabbit hole into reverse colonialism, corruption and curry.
That would be far too useful.
Chicken Confidential is an unnecessarily elaborate investigation into one of the world's great misunderstood dishes.
Butter chicken.
A dish so simple that many insist they invented it, so popular that nobody can leave it alone, and so culturally confused that it may be the perfect food through which to explain migration, nostalgia, commerce, restaurants, empire, diaspora, masculinity, aunties, dairy farming, thermodynamics and possibly the decline of Western civilisation.
This started as a small idea.
Everyone immediately told us to stop.
We didn't.
It has now become much bigger than we hoped.
Which is normally how wars begin.
We tell the story of butter chicken as though it were simultaneously:
Inside, there are
Smells like Delhi at 6:43 PM.
Charcoal, kasuri methi and somebody's uncle's aftershave.Deeply serious cultural arguments interrupted by irreverence and absurdity. Occasionally, an actual expert enters the room and explains what the hell is going on.
It then delivers precisely zero.
Instead, 17 properly qualified chefs each make what they believe is the definitive butter chicken. Same core ingredients. Same fundamentals. Microscopic freedom over colour, creaminess, smoke, sweetness, acidity, heat, texture and the precise journey of spice from the back of the tongue to the front.
This was actually the original premise for the book. 17 pages (the number of times you walk around the fire). One side a different hue of orange, the other side a butter chicken recipe. All nearly identical. All by different chefs who are very good at this. Then you have to play spot the difference.
It would have looked stunning as a book. Conceptual, not so practical.
The actual book will also not be practical.
Every chapter is filed under a different genre. Some of them are true. Choose your own adventure.
Butter chicken begins with tandoori chicken. Which means discussing something people don't give Indians nearly enough credit for.
They invented a vertical barbecue.
While everyone else laid meat horizontally over fire like amateurs, somebody looked at a clay pot and turned barbecue ninety degrees. A leap roughly comparable to the wheel. Or driving on the wrong side of the road, depending on which empire you ask.
Heat. Clay. Airflow. Radiation. Convection. Char. Why naan sticks. Why naan falls off. Why chefs put their entire arms into an oven running at temperatures normally associated with metallurgy.
Inspired by a Rotimatic listing we found on Dubizzle:
"Apple of rotimakers. Puri maker, rotimaker, pizzamaker all in one. Collection JVC."
Well done, Aarti646.
We are opensourcing the blueprint for an autonomous tandoor. Round. Vertical. Potentially sentient. It chars chicken, crisps naan, regulates heat with unnecessary artificial intelligence, plays Bollywood and, when idle, dries your lungi and kurta pajama.
Seed round coming soon. Probably.
Architecture. Stretch. Gluten. Gravity. Slap technique. Butter application. Garlic distribution. Bubbling. Burning.
And why nobody has ever eaten just one.
And farming. It goes on for too long. We apologise.
Britain took spices around the world. The world eventually sent curry back. Somewhere in the process Britain decided chicken tikka masala belonged to Glasgow.
Proper historians, not people who watched three episodes of a documentary, on curry houses, railways, partition, migration and the process by which Britain conquered India and India eventually conquered Britain's Friday night.
And brown guys making artisanal butter.
Human civilisation has apparently completed the circle.
Worship. Warships. Milk. Butter. Ghee. Politics. Desire. And one entrepreneur creating Wagu Milk™: Indian dairy cows given the Wagyu treatment. Daily brushing, cow onsen, classical music, massage and lots of Kingfisher.
This man does not exist yet. Someone reading this will unfortunately decide to become him.
The reader learns how to grow their own cashew nuts. Because butter chicken.
Spoiler: you should probably move to Côte d'Ivoire.
Every great choose-your-own-adventure romantic cookbook needs an intermission. Ideally performed by someone spectacularly famous, with a PDF insert for the audiobook.
We are optimistically imagining the audiobook narrated by Stephen Fry. Nobody has asked Stephen Fry. Stephen Fry has definitely not agreed.
This is how dreams begin.
You will laugh. You will certainly cry. You'll feel rage, euphoria, fear and loathing, basically the entire emotional rollercoaster of every Bollywood film.
What colour should butter chicken actually be?
Neon orange. Brick red. Burnt sienna. Rust. Airport lounge orange. Hotel buffet coral. Brown. Pink. Our entirely unscientific classification system, printed as real swatches. Readers compare their dinner against the official chart. Then they scratch it, and sniff it.
Pantandoor 31
Pick a swatch. Hold your dinner up to the screen. Argue with whoever you're eating with.
Historians, television titans, Michelin chefs, anti-Michelin chefs, street hawkers, models from Jaipur, rappers, politicians, designers, artists, engineers, aunties we secretly fancy, and three healthy Austrians who look more suited to a boy band than a chaos-cooking collective. Naturally, they are chefs.
"Mum, we started a cult."
Young research intern, BBC (Beyond Butter Chicken)
"I got Delhi belly just discussing this project."
Black Thunder. True story.
"It's like Monty Python meets your fit aunty in the kitchen cooking ethnic food. I'm in."
Rapper who prefers to stay anonymous until they know who else is involved.
We need some sanity to keep us in line, and to help us actually get Mayor Mamdani and the motley crew listed below to participate in the circus.
Our camp counsellors and semi-serious advisory board.
Culinary anti-establishment rock stars. Possibly shirtless. Almost certainly opinionated. Partly culinary, partly philosophical, mostly disruptive.
Our guest curators, and our Greek chorus. A multi-award-winning light artist and a food-festival veteran and handsome devil, who wandered into the wrong book and decided to stay.
William Dalrymple territory. Real history walking into our fictional nonsense.
Correcting everybody throughout the entire book. With a literary slap.
Because we all need snacks (and good advice) when it comes to feeding a nation.
Of Dubizzle. Definitely, if we can find her.
The wish list. An intentionally ridiculous cast across completely different worlds.Not everyone has said yes. Yet.
Write butter chicken a letter. We will make it disproportionately beautiful.
A love letter. Hate mail. A memory, an argument with your mum, a controversial point of view, an image from your hidden folder, a 3 a.m. voice note. Your answer to butter chicken, in your own language.
The stranger, more personal and more specific, the better. We're assembling historians, chefs, artists, musicians, troublemakers, cultural obsessives and people who have absolutely no business appearing in a book about butter chicken. Which is precisely why they belong.
We read every one. If yours makes the book, we will write back. If it doesn't, butter chicken still read it. Probably twice.
Working covers. We haven't decided. Neither have you.
A heavily designed, tactile, collectible book, closer to an art publication and a cult magazine than a cookbook. Something people buy even if they never cook from it. Because there may be nothing to cook from.
It belongs equally in a kitchen, a bookstore, a design shop, an art fair, an airport lounge, an anthropology department, and underneath the table at a very long lunch. Our previous book got us into some hot water. With luck, this one boils the pot.
The book comes alive. Sole DXB, December 2026.
Working name. No explanation. Beautiful type. A queue around Sole DXB.
Part test kitchen, part performance, part curry club, part publishing launch. A ridiculous restaurant that may exist for only three days. It should feel like someone from Copenhagen designed a Punjabi roadside darbar after three sleepless nights at an Indian wedding reading post-colonial reverse-cultural appropriation theory.
Which sounds terrible. So naturally we have to do it.
Copy it. Paste it anywhere.
Spread the word, spread the butter, spread the....legs.
We're making something mildly spicy called Chicken Confidential: part cultural anthropology, part romance novel and part investigation into the deep inner meaning of butter chicken.
It brings together serious chefs, artists, musicians, architects, farmers, engineers, historians and cultural troublemakers, with real research sitting beside deliberate nonsense.
We're asking each contributor for just one thing: a story, memory, recipe, rant, self-portrait, something from the hidden folder in your photos, a technique from your mum, a correction or a wonderfully strange yoga move.
We'll do the heavy lifting and turn it into something beautiful.
We want this book to start a party. Or incite a riot. Either way, we're building a community, and all proceeds go to helping those most in need.
Nobody asked us to make this. Which is precisely why we're making it. You must get involved!
The reader should never quite know where fact stops and fiction begins.
The serious parts make the stupid parts funnier. The stupid parts make the serious parts more memorable.
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