Chicken Tikka Masala: The Glasgow Claim

Each major claim carries one of three labels. established means supported by primary records, official bodies or several independent reliable sources. shared means the core fact is sound but sources disagree on details, dates or interpretation. traditional means widely repeated but not traceable to a primary or independent source.

No dated menu, advertisement or recipe has been found that proves where the dish was first made. The Shish Mahal claim rests mainly on Aslam's own account and his family's. Rival claims rest on similar recollections. Food historians point out that sauced chicken dishes existed earlier in South Asian cooking, and that several British restaurants may have arrived at similar dishes independently.

The search for the earliest printed use of the exact name is unfinished. One compiler of English food history found the name in a New York restaurant guide of 1975 and the first English restaurant advertisement using it in 1985. A systematic search of Glasgow newspapers and menus has not been published.

Alan Davidson's The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, ed. Tom Jaine, 2014) has now been read directly rather than through Wikipedia. Its "tikka" entry gives the reference-book consensus and the 1983 ready-meal date; its "Asian restaurants" entry gives the background of Sylheti curry houses. Its popularity figures date from before 2014 and are given as dated reference.

The dish

established Two parts. Chicken tikka is chicken marinated in yoghurt and spices and cooked at high heat, traditionally in a tandoor clay oven. The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, 2014) explains the word: "tikka" is the Hindi pronunciation of the Turkic tikkü, meaning "piece", and in English it means much the same as kebab, chunks of meat or poultry cooked on skewers in a tandoor. Tikka masala adds a separate sauce, usually based on tomato and enriched with cream or yoghurt, onion, garlic, ginger and a spice mix. There is no single standard recipe.

established Restaurant logic. Because the grilled chicken and the sauce are made separately, a kitchen can hold batches of each and combine them to order. This made the dish well suited to busy curry houses and, later, to factory ready meals.

Glasgow's South Asian restaurants

established Migration. Migrants from what are now Pakistan, India and Bangladesh have lived in Glasgow for over half a century. Many arrived in the Gorbals with little money and little English. Many started as pedlars, selling clothes door to door from a suitcase, and in the 1960s many men worked on the city's buses as conductors and drivers. Historic Environment Scotland put Glasgow's South Asian population at over 50,000 in 2019.

established The British curry house. The Oxford Companion to Food traces the wider pattern. The British taste for "curry" goes back to East India Company servants in the eighteenth century and to London coffee-house menus in the early nineteenth. Veeraswamy's, opened in London in 1926, is the oldest surviving Indian restaurant there. In the 1930s and 1940s sailors and migrant labourers, especially from Sylhet in modern Bangladesh, set up cheap curry houses, which became more popular in the 1960s. The Companion describes the style that evolved as one that stressed meat and sauce, often served with chips, at the expense of vegetable and pulse dishes. Chicken tikka in a sauce fits that pattern exactly. The Companion also notes the later British-devised balti style of the 1980s.

established Restaurants. Restaurants run by South Asian families became part of this story, serving dishes adapted to local tastes. The Shish Mahal, opened in 1964, was one of the best known. A 1970s photograph shows Aslam outside the restaurant in Gibson Street. Its present address is on Park Road.

The Shish Mahal story

shared The claim. Aslam, born in Pakistan, moved to Glasgow as a boy and opened the Shish Mahal in 1964. He said that in the early 1970s a customer, often described as a bus driver, sent back his chicken tikka as too dry. Aslam had a sauce made for it. "We thought we'd better cook the chicken with some sauce," he recalled. In a 2009 interview he said: "So since then we've been cooking it with a sauce made of yoghurt, cream and spices." Sources give the year as 1970 or 1971.

shared The tomato soup. The restaurant's own account says the sauce was based on Campbell's condensed tomato soup, which Aslam had to hand because he was eating it while recovering from a stomach ulcer. The London restaurateur and former trade editor Iqbal Wahhab has said that he and the late curry writer Peter Grove made up the tomato soup story to entertain journalists who kept asking where the dish came from. The admission was repeated in the book Pie Fidelity, with the remark that "a couple of bottles of wine urged us on". It is not clear whether the soup detail began in Glasgow or in London, so it should be treated as unproven. The Oxford Companion to Food files the soup story under "culinary mythology", and in its version the cook is an unnamed Bangladeshi who spiced up a can of creamed tomato soup for a customer wanting gravy with his tandoori chicken. That the same anecdote is told of different cooks is itself a sign of a travelling story rather than a record.

shared What can be said. Aslam consistently claimed the dish and was widely recognised in Glasgow as its creator. No contemporary record has been published that confirms the date or the details.

Rival claims

shared Glasgow. Sultan Ahmed Ansari, owner of Glasgow's Taj Mahal, claimed to have created the dish in the 1950s. Peter Grove questioned Aslam's claim on the grounds that the Shish Mahal opened later than the date Ansari gave.

shared England. Other accounts credit Bangladeshi chefs, who ran most British "Indian" restaurants in the 1960s, including cooks in Birmingham. The businessman Gulam Noon is credited with helping to popularise the dish, not with inventing it.

shared India. In 2009 Delhi food writers rejected the Glasgow claim. Rahul Verma, a food critic, called it "basically a Punjabi dish not more than 40-50 years old". A chef at Delhi's Karim's restaurant said his family had made it for generations as a Mughlai dish. Delhi's Moti Mahal restaurant, associated with butter chicken (murgh makhani), a close relative, also claims to be a source.

shared Earlier recipes. Peter and Colleen Grove suggested that a "Shahi Chicken Masala" in Mrs Balbir Singh's Indian Cookery (1961) may have been an early version. Chicken tikka itself is much older than any of these sauced dishes.

established The reference-book verdict. The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, 2014) reaches the same conclusion this card does. It says there was a proto-recipe in Mrs Balbir Singh's Indian Cookery (1961), that many have claimed the invention but none is proven, and that the dish is universally accepted as British-Asian, probably early 1970s. Elsewhere it offers chicken tikka masala as a classic example of immigrant creativity, comparing it with General Tso's chicken, a supposedly Hunanese dish created in Taiwan. It does not mention Glasgow or the Shish Mahal at all, which shows how far the Glasgow claim is from being the accepted account outside Scotland.

established The tandoor came first. The food historian Lizzie Collingham, in Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors (2005), traces the dish to a technical change in British curry houses. The Gaylord in Mortimer Street, London, was probably the first restaurant in Britain to install a tandoor: The Good Food Guide of 1968 reported its "proper mud oven" turning out "tandoori chicken masal". Other restaurants followed, and chicken tikka spread through British menus. Collingham places the invention of chicken tikka masala after this, when tandoori chicken began to be served in a tomato and cream sauce. On this account no sauced tikka dish could have become common before the late 1960s, which fits the early-1970s date of the Shish Mahal claim but does not prove it.

shared Collingham's version of the story. Collingham tells the familiar tale of a customer complaining that his chicken tikka was too dry, and a chef improvising a gravy from Campbell's tomato soup, cream and spices. She names no chef, restaurant or city, and she presents it as the story told by the dish's critics, not as a documented event. Her point is about authenticity: the critics who condemned the dish in 2001 as a "mongrel" British invention were judging it by the wrong standard, since restaurant cooking in Britain had always adapted to its customers. She gives the figure, current when she wrote, of at least 18 tons eaten in Britain every week.

established Who cooked it. Collingham shows how the British curry house grew out of Sylheti seamen's savings after the Second World War. They bought bombed-out cafés and run-down fish-and-chip shops, and many first-generation owners learned the trade at a few London restaurants. In Scotland, she notes, almost all fish-and-chip shops had been owned by Italian immigrants; South Asian owners began buying such shops across Britain in the 1950s and 1960s. Most "Indian" restaurants in Britain were in fact run by Bangladeshis by the time the dish became famous.

shared A reasonable conclusion. The evidence fits best with the dish emerging within Britain's South Asian restaurant trade, as cooks adapted tandoori dishes for British customers who expected a sauce. Glasgow's Shish Mahal has the best-known individual claim, but exclusive priority cannot be proved. This view credits Aslam without erasing the wider migrant restaurant culture that produced the dish.

A "national dish"

established Robin Cook's speech. On 19 April 2001, speaking to the Social Market Foundation in London about British identity, Robin Cook said: "Chicken Tikka Massala is now a true British national dish, not only because it is the most popular, but because it is a perfect illustration of the way Britain absorbs and adapts external influences." He added that chicken tikka is an Indian dish and the masala sauce was added "to satisfy the desire of British people to have their meat served in gravy."

shared Reactions. The speech was criticised by some Indian chefs and commentators. Historians of British food, including Panikos Panayi, have argued that its underlying point, that immigration changed British eating, was correct. The historian Elizabeth Buettner has studied South Asian restaurants in Britain and the limits of the multicultural story told about them.

established Ready meals. The Oxford Companion to Food reports that supermarkets began selling chicken tikka masala as a chilled meal in 1983, and says that this made it a candidate for "England's national dish". Its edition of 2014 gives the dish as the most popular order in British Indian restaurants, at some 16 per cent of all curries sold; that figure predates the Companion's publication and should be treated as a dated estimate. Ready meals spread the dish far beyond restaurants and standardised its recipe.

The 2009 protection bid

established The motion. On 16 July 2009 Mohammad Sarwar, Labour MP for Glasgow Central, tabled early day motion 1911, "Glasgow Chicken Tikka Masala". It credited the dish to Aslam at the Shish Mahal in the 1970s, noted that Glasgow had three times won the title of curry capital of Britain, and supported a bid for EU Protected Designation of Origin. It attracted 19 signatures. Glasgow City Council supported the campaign.

established The outcome. The dish did not receive protected status. Protected Designation of Origin normally requires a product to be made in a defined area using a recognised method, which is hard to show for a dish cooked around the world.

Aslam's death and the restaurant today

established His death. Ali Ahmed Aslam, known to customers as "Mr Ali", died in December 2022, aged 77. The Shish Mahal announced his death and closed for 48 hours.

established The restaurant in 2026. The family-run Shish Mahal describes itself as "the birthplace of chicken tikka masala" and sells its own sauces. Earlier in 2026 it worked with the German Doner Kebab chain on a limited "Tikka Masala OG Kebab". In September 2026 the company that runs the restaurant, Shish Mahal Ltd, entered creditors' voluntary liquidation, and the restaurant's future was reported as unclear.

• Robin Cook spelled it "Massala" in his 2001 speech.
• The earliest use of the name found so far in print is in a New York restaurant guide of 1975.
• A 2009 Commons motion on chicken tikka masala attracted 19 MPs' signatures.
• Another Glasgow restaurateur claimed to have created the dish in the 1950s.
• The tomato soup story may have been invented by two London curry writers.
• London's Gaylord restaurant was probably the first in Britain with a tandoor, reported in 1968; without the tandoor there was no chicken tikka to sauce.
• An Indian waiter, Daniel Santiagoe, worked at Glasgow's International Exhibition of 1888 and published a book on making curries in England.
• The Shish Mahal closed for two days when Aslam died.
• "Tikka" comes from a Turkic word meaning "piece".
• The Oxford Companion to Food tells the tomato-soup story of an unnamed Bangladeshi cook, not of Aslam.

• Disputed: Chicken tikka masala was invented in Glasgow. Ali Ahmed Aslam of the Shish Mahal made the best-known claim, but it rests mainly on his own account and his family's. No contemporary record confirms it, and The Oxford Companion to Food says "none is proven" and does not mention Glasgow.
• Disputed: the year of the Shish Mahal claim. Aslam said the early 1970s. Sources give 1970 or 1971, and no dated menu, advertisement or recipe has been found.
• Disputed: the sauce was made with tinned tomato soup. The restaurant's own account says so. The London restaurateur Iqbal Wahhab says he and the curry writer Peter Grove made the detail up to amuse journalists. The Companion tells the same anecdote of an unnamed Bangladeshi cook and files it under "culinary mythology".
• Disputed: who else invented it. Rival claims include Sultan Ahmed Ansari of Glasgow's Taj Mahal in the 1950s, Bangladeshi cooks in Birmingham and elsewhere, and Delhi chefs who call it Punjabi or Mughlai. The best-supported view is that the dish emerged in Britain's South Asian restaurant trade, built on cooks adapting tandoori dishes for customers who expected a sauce.
• Myth: Robin Cook said the dish was a Glasgow invention. In 2001 he called it "a true British national dish" as an illustration of how Britain absorbs and adapts outside influences. The speech, as quoted, names no place of origin.
• Myth: Glasgow's chicken tikka masala has protected status. A 2009 Commons motion backed an EU Protected Designation of Origin bid, but protection was not granted.