Of
Alexander Menden
The customer is king. If any concrete confirmation of this golden rule of service was ever needed, it was provided by Ali Ahmed Aslam nearly half a century ago. At some point in the 1970s, the Pakistani restaurateur was fond of telling, a customer at his Glasgow restaurant Shish Mahal, which Aslam had been running since 1964, complained that the chicken tikka was too dry. Tikka, to explain this to non-curry folk, consists of cuts of meat or vegetarian alternatives marinated in spices and yoghurt and cooked in the tandoor oven. In response to the complaint, Ali Aslam went into the kitchen and added a tomato sauce with masala spice mix to the chicken dish. And the Chicken Tikka Masala was born (there are alternative origin stories, but we can confidently ignore them as apocryphal).