Popularity Chicken tikka masala is served in restaurants around the world. By 2010, it was the most popular dish in British curry houses.
The Oxford Companion to Food traces this popularity to 1983, when supermarkets began selling the dish as a chilled meal; and as of 2016 it was the third most popular ready meal sold in UK supermarkets. In 2025, the scholars of Indian food Bhaskar Sailesh and K. Karthikeyan called it "the world's best-recognized dish". In 2009, efforts by Scottish parliamentarian
Mohammed Sarwar to gain the Glasgow dish
protected designation of origin status were however unsuccessful. In India, chicken tikka masala has been seen as a novelty dish in its own right, and alongside that it has been used as a pizza topping by an Indian fast food chain.
BBC Good Food has proposed chicken tikka masala pizzas, using
naan flatbreads topped with the curry mix, yoghurt, and
mango chutney.
Symbol of a multicultural society British dish. Pizzas originated from Italy. In 2001, the British
Foreign Secretary Robin Cook mentioned the dish in a speech acclaiming the benefits of Britain's
multiculturalism, declaring: The social scientists Binod Baral and Basanta Adhikari carried out a statistical survey of people's views of the role of chicken tikka masala in the UK; the participants lived in the UK and had eaten in British Indian restaurants. They write that the dish "represents the
fusion of British and Indian culinary traditions", and "serves as a symbol of multicultural society". The scholar of human geography
Peter Jackson describes the evolution of chicken tikka masala as an elaborate process of cultural assimilation and rejection. The process resulted in the "indigenisation" of the original dish, giving it a distinctively British quality. Jackson specifically rejects the charge of
cultural appropriation, which he considers a simplistic view of the interchanges involved. Cook's invocation of chicken tikka masala as a national dish and its description of the dish's origin as British have been widely debated. The speech has been criticised by Indian chefs and commentators as disrespectful to Indian cuisine, where in their view the dish is a "cognate of curries originating in South Asia"
appropriated by "White British colonialists". The social historian
Panikos Panayi, noting the criticism of the speech, writes that Cook's central point, that
immigration had influenced British food, was correct.
Authenticity The scholar of modern history Elizabeth Buettner writes that "popular dishes like chicken tikka masala were mocked as the antithesis of 'real' Indian food as often as they were celebrated as a 'British national dish'." Buettner noted that these attacks on British Indian restaurants came from both "middle-class white Britons and better-off South Asians". The Indian chef
Raghavan Iyer notes the shock of "some food critics" at Cook's speech, writing of chicken tikka masala that they "deemed it 'inauthentic because of the addition of a sauce in Britain. Other scholars, such as the anthropologist
Sidney Mintz, deny that there is such a thing as a national cuisine, since habits of cooking and of eating do not respect national borders. The historian of food
Lizzie Collingham discusses the question of the authenticity of Indian food in Britain, with respect to chicken tikka masala. She gives as an example the journalist and film-maker
Jonathan Meades, who wrote in
The Times that far from being a pleasing instance of how multicultural the British were, it showed how they could turn anything into an inedible and unappetising mess. Further, Collingham cites the British Bangladeshi businessman
Iqbal Wahhab and journalist
Emma Brockes's view that the problem with chicken tikka masala is that it is inauthentic. Collingham writes that what Indians eat is highly variable, being a product of their caste, regional origin, religion, and wealth. == See also ==