At Goila Butter Chicken in London, lunch is served with a lavish, side portion of hyperbole. According to chef Saransh Goila, this is not merely butter chicken, but, “quite simply the best butter chicken in the world”. I scrutinised the website for a touch of tongue in cheek, but instead also discovered that Mumbai-based Goila has “single-handedly turned butter chicken into a religion in India”. Similar to Noel Gallagher believing 1997-era Oasis was “bigger than God”, Goila’s butter chicken is now an omnipresent deity. This is massive, if true.
What is definitely true is that Goila is a name on the Mumbai food scene, hosting shows on Indian cookery channel Food Food and appearing on Australian MasterChef. In 2014 he entered the Limca Book of Records for “longest road journey by a chef”, a title unrivalled by Gordon, Fred and Gino’s madlad antics across Mexico. Goila is a smooth operator: his butter chicken is available via meal kit, recently appeared on BBC1’s Saturday Kitchen and there are Goila Butter Chicken cafes across Mumbai, Pune and Bengaluru. This is his first opening in London: a strip of 12 seats along a sit-up bar in a busy restaurant thoroughfare near Oxford Street.
With Goila Butter Chicken’s preamble being so verbose, eating there couldn’t fail to be something of a disappointment. This is not the Hanging Gardens of Babylon; it’s an anonymous-looking cafe, on the side of a pop-up restaurant space called Carousel. To the unassuming eye, there is nothing of interest. It’s a white, undecorated space with a few friendly folk serving up bowls of butter chicken – which have been cooked elsewhere, not behind the counter – with sides of dal makhani, jeera rice and sourdough naan. Saransh Goila himself was too busy to make an appearance in the opening weeks, although he describes the space as “very, very casual”. This is a fancy way of saying: “You’d be more comfortable at home.”
