The butter chicken pie has risen from a niche fusion food to New Zealand’s third-best-selling pie flavour. Who gave the nation this unique culinary taonga?

“I hate that mixture. It’s just weird.” It was the morning of December 1, 2015, and Paul Henry was absolutely fuming. Hillary Barry stared in silence as he ranted. “Butter chicken and pies, it’s just not right. What is wrong with rice? Butter chicken with rice, mince and cheese in a pie. I’m sorry, but that’s the way the world should be.”

The world didn’t listen to Paul Henry’s opinion of how it should be. As time marched forward, the popularity of the butter chicken pie continued to rise. It happened like falling in love: slowly, then all at once. One moment, it was a gourmet option that bougie bakers used to show off their creativity. The next, it was everywhere. Every supermarket, every bakery. Even in the dustiest dairy with a banged-up warmer full of stale, plastic-wrapped pastries, you can find a butter chicken pie.

At Z petrol stations, butter chicken is the third best-selling pie flavour, behind steak and cheese and mince and cheese, according to Z Energy head of convenience retail Darren Rusden. At BP Wildbean cafes, it “continues to consistently rank in our top three flavours alongside mince and cheese and the popular steak and cheese pies,” communications manager Gordon Gillan said. 

The butter chicken pie has climbed its way onto the heating racks of greatness. It is the greatest advancement to New Zealand’s national dish in decades. While bakers are constantly inventing new pie flavours, butter chicken is the first one to make the leap from craft to mainstream since cheese was mixed into mince. (Newsroom’s Jonathan Milne credits that invention to Paul Barber of Goodtime Pie Co).

To be mentioned in the same sentence as mince and cheese and steak and cheese is to reach immortality. These flavours are more than just pastry fillings; they’re part of our national identity. Hearty, practical, humble, with working-class roots but high ambitions. They are New Zealand. And now, the butter chicken pie is too. 

And what could be more representative of modern New Zealand than the butter chicken pie? A fusion of an old European tradition, given a fresh new flavour influenced by immigrant communities and moulded into something truly our own. Alexa play ‘Welcome Home’ by Dave Dobbyn.

But wait, I hear you say, are we sure it was a New Zealand invention? Could it have come from our pie-loving cousins, the Australians?  First of all, how dare you. Secondly, no. The evidence is clear that New Zealand was well ahead of the West Island when it came to putting butter chicken inside pastry, and even more so when it came to mass adoption. 

When Four’n’Twenty launched its first butter chicken pie in 2021, the Australian press treated it as a novelty. A headline in the Daily Mail read “Forget the classic meat pie: Iconic Aussie brand launches a range of BUTTER CHICKEN pies – so would you try them?” As if to emphasise what a sad, backwards land Australia is, the story quoted an unimpressed man who said, “New Zealand has been doing butter chicken pies for years.” 

The origin of butter chicken curry is hotly contested, but it is mostly commonly accepted to have been invented in the 1950s by Kundan Lal Gujral and Kundan Lal Jaggi at Moti Mahal restaurant in Old Delhi’s Daryaganj neighbourhood. The dish was created by chance when chefs combined leftover tandoori chicken with a rich, buttery tomato sauce to prevent it from drying out. (Butter chicken’s origin story is often confused with chicken tikka masala, which was invented in Glasgow, Scotland. Butter chicken is an authentic Indian dish, albeit a modern one.)

The first time the term “butter chicken” appeared on a Western, English-language menu was 1975 at Gaylord Indian restaurant in New York. It probably arrived in New Zealand in the late 1980s during the first boom of Indian restaurants after a wave of migration from the subcontinent. By the early 2000s, butter chicken had made the leap to “mainstream ethnic” food and was familiar to most New Zealanders. 

It was inevitable that once the Indian butter chicken and New Zealand-style meat pie started cohabitating in the same country, they would be combined in a saucy melange. It’s meat chunks in a fatty sauce, wrapped in fatty pastry. A marriage made in heaven. 

But who did it first? Who is the national hero who played matchmaker to these two great foods? As an employee of The Spinoff, I am contractually obliged to do everything within my means to identify the inventors of iconic New Zealand cuisine. So I started tracing through the archives of the internet and print media, going backwards in time, looking for clues about its origin. 

2015: McDonald’s adds a butter chicken pie to the Georgie Pie range, rolling it out to 169 franchises nationwide. George Weston Food introduces the Big Ben Butter Chicken XXL. General manager Mark Adam says: “The real question around launching a butter chicken pie under the Big Ben brand is, ‘Why didn’t we do it sooner? Butter chicken is New Zealand’s most popular Indian dish, and when we asked Big Ben customers, 62% told us they loved the idea of a butter chicken pie. We think Big Ben Butter Chicken XXL will be a winner.”

Also, Art Green and Matilda Rice buy a butter chicken pie during a road trip to celebrate their newfound love. 

2014: The Press reports that “an unlucky Christchurch man lost his cellphone, wallet and his butter chicken pie after he was beaten and robbed in Edgeware”.

2013: Michael Donaldson, writing in the Sunday Star Times, compares the gentrification of pies to the craft beer revolution. He suggests some pie/beer pairings. The butter chicken pie “is a pie that needs some floral input, so I’d be popping the top off a classic New Zealand IPA”. 

2012: Z service stations introduce the Gourmet Butter Chicken pie. 

2009: New Zealand expat Alka Patel opens a New Zealand-style pie shop in San Francisco. The menu includes a butter chicken pie. 

2008: 16-year-old Wellington High School student Keri Howlett-Hewitt tells the Dominion Post he bought a butter chicken pie and a hot samosa from the dairy to get around the school’s healthy eating rules. 

2005: Jesters Pies, an early mover in the exotic pie flavour space, adds a butter chicken pie to its menu. This was a strangely late addition; the Wayback Machine shows that a chicken laksa pie and a beef vindaloo pie were on Jesters’ menu at least three years earlier.

2004: A user on Toyspeed.org.nz, a message board for Toyota enthusiasts, writes: “You aint had a real pie till youve had a butter chicken pie, maaaan they are teh bomb”.

2003: The tabloid NZ Truth runs a short review of six pies to eat while watching the Rugby World Cup. The Aashiayana Butter Chicken Pie (230g) scores a 5/5. At $4.19, it was by far the most expensive on the list. (I couldn’t find any record of a bakery called Aashiayana.) 

2002: A Sunday Star Times column recommends some things to do in Auckland on the weekend of September 22. For entertainment, they suggest the newly released film Austin Powers in Goldmember, “starring Destiny’s Child’s Beyonce Knowles”.  For food, they endorse a butter chicken pie from a Mt Eden cafe: “The price is steep for a pie, but it’s worth every delicious morsel. For $5.50, bite into one of the world’s truly great curry pie experiences – the butter chicken pie from the Essential Deli, 455b Mt Eden Rd. Open 10am-2.30pm.”

Is this the first-ever butter chicken pie? It’s impossible to know for sure. Most likely, the butter chicken pie is a case of parallel inventions; multiple bakers over the years having the independent idea to put butter chicken curry into a pie crust. But this is the earliest written source I’ve been able to find. 

I contacted Essential Deli to ask if anyone was around in 2002 and remembered putting butter chicken into a pie. Adrienne Moors, who has owned Essential Deli since 2001, told me yes, she believes they created the first butter chicken pie. “I do think that was the original,” she said. “Somebody will probably contest it, but as far as I know, there was nothing around before that.”

She credits the invention of the butter chicken pie to Donna North, who was the chef in the early 2000s. “We were making butter chicken to serve as a meal with rice. As far as I recall, Donna just decided she’d put some extra in a pie one day. And they were yummy.”

The butter chicken pie was an instant success. “We had a lot of Indian customers who used to come in and buy the butter chicken, which was a good sign. Then they were coming in and buying the pies, and that sort of got embarrassing. They should be making their own butter chicken better than we can, right?”

Essential Deli still sells a butter chicken pie, and it’s still excellent. A hefty parcel of incredibly flaky pastry, filled with a rich, thick curry and a generous portion of meat. “For a while there, we felt very much like a pie shop. We were selling a lot of pies. Then everybody got on the wagon. We sell less now, but they’re still good pies.”

Until now, Essential Deli has never publicly claimed to have invented the butter chicken pie, but it was “always at the back of our mind”, Moor said. “We all thought it was a hilarious joke. A silly thing that became very successful.”

Do you have evidence of a butter chicken pie that predates 2002? Email me at joel@thespinoff.co.nz.