Kikli Gurugram Skips The Butter Chicken On Purpose

There is a kadai at Kikli made of sarbloh, the same metal used in the kada worn by Sikhs, and it spends its days cooking a dal that has never so much as heard of dal makhani. That tells you most of what you need to know about the place. Chef Amninder Sandhu opened the first Kikli in Connaught Place four years ago; the second has now landed in Gurugram’s Sector 54, carrying the same brief: dig up the Punjabi food that Punjab stopped cooking, and get it back on a plate before it vanishes for good. “That’s the consistent compliment that I’m getting from guests,” Sandhu chukcled, “that it’s not your usual run-of-the-mill menu.” 

I turned up for a Sunday lunch, braced for the greatest hits. I got a syllabus instead, and I’m not complaining.

What Actually Showed Up

We opened with the salaad, said the Punjabi way, because “salad” apparently sounds too polite for what’s in it: chilled honeydew melon, charred peaches, mint, basil, ricotta, macadamia nuts, and a chatpata falsa dressing doing most of the work. Sandhu built the dish after noticing plums, melons, and peaches piled up on carts across Punjab during her research trips. 

The satpura chaat came next, seven layers of crisp pastry propping up khatti-meethi aloo di launji, choley, and an imli chutney good enough to justify a solo order. Then the bun kebab, a mutton kebab wrapped in a soft, frothy egg casing, which was, unambiguously, the dish of the meal. It fell apart the way good things are supposed to. The chapli kebab (minced mutton, garlic fat, green chillies) was strong too, but has the shelf life of a snowman; eat it hot or watch it seize up. There’s a khumba chapli kebab for vegetarians, and it earns its place on the menu rather than just occupying it.

For mains: the raan, a portion generous enough to make you question whether you’re being fed or hazed, best mopped up with mushki roti, a naturally fermented bread finished with a slick of ghee. Kikli drops naan and tandoori roti entirely in favour of things like toonhi roti, billed as a Punjabi cousin of the Sindhi koki, and the resemblance actually holds up. Vegetarians get gobhi bharmi (a whole baked cauliflower), choley, and patti kulchey with imli chutney, all dependable. The one dish that needs work is the kathal pulao. The jackfruit’s flavour got lost somewhere between the pot and the plate, and the pulao around it didn’t say much either.

Then dessert, which is where Sandhu really shows off. The Kikli Kheer takes atta halwa, the same halwa handed out as kada prasad at gurdwaras, and layers it under a cold rice kheer, whipped cream, burnt caramel and almond praline. Best thing on the menu.

Since it was lunch, I stuck mostly to mocktails. Aam Aadmi Soda (aam panna, plum, dry mint, roasted cumin, sea salt, citrus) was the clear winner, with Rooh Shanti (sabja, rooh afza, lime, coconut water) and Fresh Thela (sugarcane juice, mint, black salt, ginger) as respectable backups. 

I did allow myself one cocktail, the Ambi, tequila silver with aam panna, fresh lime and a house spice-salt mix, and the proportion and mixology tasted a lot like something I’ve had at Barbet & Pals in GK. That’s because it more or less is: Kikli’s bar programme is by Jeet Rana and Chirag Pal, the same duo who curate the bar at Barbet & Pals, whose food menu happens to be curated by Sandhu. Drinks come in Regular and Patiala pours, and there’s a Tadka Marke Beer that pairs a beer with a Patiala peg, because restraint was clearly never part of the plan.

Recipes Like Scripture

Sandhu isn’t from Punjab. She grew up in Jorhat, Assam, and her first trip to Punjab was at age three. “Till I was 20, I never went back.” She only returned on her own terms at 20, and that trip is where the years of research that eventually became Kikli began.

Her deepest source was Sarvesh Kaur, great-granddaughter of Maharaja Bhupinder Singh of Patiala, whom Sandhu called Nikki Maasi and lost two years ago. “She would talk me through the recipe and at the end of it, always say the same thing was cooked in a heavy-bottomed copper vessel on an open fire. This would taste so different,” Sandhu said. “That’s how I found my rhythm in cooking.” 

Bhupinder Singh’s kitchens, by her account, ran on roughly 80 cooks producing about 1,200 recipes, travelled with him in an entourage of 180 people who carried his own cookware, and once served 50 different versions of a single mussalam. That excess now lives on at Kikli through Malka Dal and Duggani Pulao, the latter deliberately loaded with more mutton and less rice than any pulao has a right to have.

Sandhu also runs Palaash at Tipai, where she cooks over open fire and has pushed restaurant kitchens back toward copper ladles, away from the thin-bottomed handis most chutneys and gravies get made in now.

As for the name, kikli is a Punjabi game in which two women grip hands and spin as fast as they can. It’s called pugdi in Maharashtra, with versions scattered across the country. “It’s feminine but also very strong at the same time,” Sandhu said.

The Metal, The Fire, And The Century She’s Actually Cooking From

Most of Kikli’s food is cooked in sarbloh, the alloy used both for kada prasad and for the kada itself, which tradition holds protects you from the outside as armour and from the inside as food. No refined oil comes anywhere near the kitchen. Only ghee is used in the dishes.

The other constant is the hara, a setup fired by cow dung cakes or wood, with a closed chamber that circulates smoke around whatever’s cooking. “I believe dal roti is Punjab’s gift to the world,” Sandhu said. “When I saw how the hara changed the flavour of dal, I knew I had to bring one into Kikli.” At the Gurugram outlet, Malka Dal slow cooks over it, along with Chuara Chironji Doodh, which also turns up on the menu reworked as a soft serve.

Sandhu is specific about which Punjab she means: 1799 to 1839, when Lahore was the capital of the Sikh Empire under Maharaja Ranjit Singh, rather than the fuzzier, more contested framing the region’s food usually gets stuck with. Her family history sits close to that history in a different way. Her ancestral village, Granthgarh in Gurdaspur, briefly went to Pakistan in August 1947 before being handed back two days later. She points to Jugni as an example of the kind of muddle she’d rather sort out than repeat: the 1908 folk song began when singers mangled the word “Jubilee” into “Jugni,” which became a stand-in character for freedom and repression, and later picked up religious lines in Pakistani versions that Indian singers, oddly, started echoing without ever writing their own.

The Gurugram space, designed by Ariane Ginwala, carries over the visual language of the Delhi original: chowk poorana-style mudwork, Phulkari references, wood, and brass, without simply copying it over. The house instructions for staff are blunt and, frankly, correct: “You can make a mistake, but be generous and be warm. Ek katori daal, ek dessert, ek extra roti, kuch nahi hota, khilao.” One more bowl of dal, one more dessert, one more roti. It costs nothing. Just feed people.

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