Delhi Kabab Tales

So crazy is this city about its meat fix that you can find kababs in hundreds of locations, from the lanes around Jama Masjid to five star hotels restaurants.

Monkey Bar
It may not be the most obvious place to score a kabab but once their Galouti Killer has melted spontaneously on your palate, you’ll agree on its pre-eminence. Made of beef mince that has been blitzed into a silken softness, it relies on texture and lightness for its appeal. 

Kasbah
This cluster of restaurants in Greater Kailash N-Block Market is topped by an Indian restaurant called Zaffran. Among the kababs they do is a raan: smoky with the coal in the tandoor and succulent because of optimal cooking time, it has the perfect interplay between meat and spices.

Bukhara
All the kababs here are of a uniform standard, but few sweat the small stuff as meticulously as the ITC Maurya does. So, their Paneer Tikka is marinated in cream before being spiced. The result is a melt-in-the-mouth morsel that has no parallel anywhere else. Herbivores can rest easy: Bukhara maintains a tandoor specifically for vegetarian kababs.

Al Javed
In the back lane of Defence Colony Market, this serves a range of kababs, of which the succulent Seekh Kabab is the finest, a triumph of spicing and texture. The mince that goes into the kabab is not so finely ground, the better to differentiate it from their kakori kabab.

Ustad Moinuddin
He doesn’t have a shop, so by definition he doesn’t have a trade name either. He doesn’t have a fancy address and has been sitting on the same spot of pavement near Chawri Bazar for as long as anyone can remember. Such is the quality of his beef seekhs that kabab aficionados flock to him from all over the city.