At a glance
- Bread: Soft sliced white or brown loaf bread, or a chain's baked sub roll
- Chicken: Boneless pieces marinated in yogurt, ginger, garlic and chilli, cooked to a char, then chopped or shredded
- Binder: Mint mayonnaise, green chutney or a spoonful of hung curd
- Crunch: Sliced onion, cucumber, capsicum, sometimes tomato
- Where: Chain sub counters, cafe menus, street grills and home lunchboxes in Indian cities
- Served: Cold in two slices, toasted in a press, or warmed in a sub oven
A Subway counter in New Delhi, or Ahmedabad, or any of the 70 or so Indian cities the chain reports, sells a sub called Chicken Tandoori, and it is the clearest picture of how this sandwich is made in India. Chicken breast marinated in yogurt, ginger and garlic is cooked, cut into small pieces, and piled into a baked roll with onion, cucumber and capsicum. A pump of mint mayonnaise goes over it, and the sandwich is warmed so the bread edges crisp and the red-brown chicken steams slightly. It is eaten in the hand. The chicken is a filling here, chopped to the size of a thumbnail so that every bite carries some.
Away from the chains, the same filling goes into a very different sandwich. At an Indian sandwich stall or cafe the bread is usually a pillowy sliced loaf, white or brown, buttered edge to edge and often painted with green chutney of coriander, mint and green chilli before anything else touches it. The chicken goes on, then thin onion and cucumber, and the whole thing lands on a flat grill press. The press does the work of a tandoor on the outside: ridged brown stripes on the crust, a hot tear of steam when the knife goes through corner to corner, the smell of toasting butter running into charred spice. Tandoori chicken made for this job gets cooked a little long on purpose, because it has to survive being chopped and then reheated.
Binding is where kitchens differ. A cafe that wants a creamy sandwich folds the chopped chicken through mayonnaise, sometimes with a spoon of cheese spread, and the result is soft and pale orange. A sharper version stirs it with hung curd, green chilli and chaat masala, which brings back the sourness of the original marinade and keeps the filling tight between slices. Capsicum adds a green, slightly bitter crunch that stands up to the heat. A loose filling escapes at the first bite, and one drowned in mayonnaise tastes of mayonnaise, so the better counters weigh the binder out in spoonfuls and season the mixture a second time after the chicken is stirred in, since cold dairy mutes salt and chilli.
The sandwich fits the way lunch travels in Indian cities. Offices, colleges and railway journeys all favour food that can sit in a steel or plastic box for hours, and two slices of bread around a spiced filling stay edible at room temperature. Parents pack the cold version; the grill stall makes the hot one for the person who walks past at six in the evening. Both are eaten by hand, usually wrapped in a square of paper or foil, with a squeeze of ketchup or a pouch of green chutney on the side. A tandoori flavour here means the red marinade, the char and a warm chilli finish, and customers order it by that word alone.
Heat is the other ordering decision. Chain menus tend to list a mild tandoori sub beside a hotter tikka one, with the tikka spiced more heavily through the chicken itself, and a counter will ask whether you want the sub toasted. Street grills ask about chutney and cheese instead, and many will add a slice or a grated handful if you say so. Vegetarian customers, a large share of the market, are served a paneer version from the same station with the same sauces, so the chicken and the paneer sit side by side on menus.
Origin and history
Who first put tandoori chicken between slices of bread in India goes unrecorded, and the sandwich has no founding shop. What is documented is its arrival on chain menus. Subway opened its first Indian store in New Delhi roughly a decade before March 2011, and the brothers Robby and Bobby Gulri are named as the franchisee and development agents who brought it in. The company has said it serves no pork or beef in the country, which left chicken and paneer to carry the menu.
In March 2011 the chain's 200th Indian store opened in Ahmedabad, run by franchisees Krunal Patel and Dipen Patel, with Paneer Tikka and Chicken Tandoori among the customer favourites. The chicken here borrows the name and marinade of the dish that Kundan Lal Gujral's Moti Mahal made famous in Delhi, but the carrier changed from naan to a sub roll or a slice of loaf bread. The Chicken Tandoori sub has remained on the menu long enough to be listed by name in the Indian Subway range in 2019.
The Ahmedabad opening gives the sandwich its firmest anchor: a two-franchisee store, the 200th in the country, whose counter sold a yogurt-marinated chicken sub to customers in a city better known for its vegetarian food.