Best Butter Chicken
in Adelaide

Butter chicken is a relatively modern invention with a well-known origin story: it was created in the kitchens of Moti Mahal in Delhi around the 1950s, where cooks revived leftover tandoori chicken by simmering it in a gravy of tomatoes, butter and cream. The result was so popular it spread across India and then the world, becoming the default “Indian curry” on menus from London to Adelaide.

Its global fame is also its problem: many versions abroad have drifted into sweet, fluorescent-orange territory that a Delhi cook would barely recognise. A good kitchen treats it as a proper dish — real tandoor-cooked chicken, a gravy built on cooked-down tomatoes, and restraint with the sugar and cream.

The gravy should be silky and balanced — savoury and lightly tangy from tomato first, with sweetness and richness from butter and cream as support, not the headline. The signature aroma comes from kasuri methi (dried fenugreek), crushed in at the end; without it, the dish tastes generic. Crucially, the chicken should taste of the tandoor: lightly charred and smoky, marinated and cooked separately, then folded in — not pale, boiled cubes added to a sauce.

The faults reviewers call out are consistent: “too sweet”, “oily”, “tastes like tinned tomato soup”, or “dry, rubbery chicken”. The praise is just as consistent — “rich”, “creamy but not heavy”, “smoky”, “best I’ve had”. Those are the exact signals the Tastibase score is built from.

They get muddled constantly. Butter chicken (makhani) is tomato-led, buttery and fragrant with fenugreek. Chicken tikka masala is a close cousin — grilled tikka in a spiced tomato-cream sauce — but generally a touch more robustly spiced and is widely considered a British-Indian creation. Korma is different again: milder and nuttier, thickened with cream, yoghurt, ground nuts or coconut rather than tomato. If you like butter chicken but want less sweetness, a well-made tikka masala is often the better order.

Every restaurant above is scored only on its butter chicken, from the sentiment of real review mentions blended lightly with star ratings, then shrunk toward the average so one rave can’t fluke its way to the top. Use the confidence labels — “high confidence” means a hundred or more diners mentioned the dish specifically — and the map to find the best butter chicken near you. Only the last three years of reviews count, so the ranking reflects how these kitchens are cooking now.

Pair it with plain or garlic naan to mop up the gravy, or jeera (cumin) rice. If you find typical butter chicken too sweet, ask for it less sweet — most kitchens will oblige. Vegetarians should look for paneer makhani or malai kofta, which use the same makhani gravy. And if a menu also lists a dedicated “murgh makhani” alongside a generic butter chicken, that is usually a sign the kitchen takes the dish seriously.