Restaurant Review: Moti Mahal Delux in Manhattan

• NYT top pick
• ★★

An Exultation of Lentils

Karsten Moran for The New York Times

Moti Mahal Delux on First Avenue.

FOODS that give us a deep feeling of indulgence aren't always the ones you'd expect. There are spoonfuls of caviar that taste of little more than salt, and slices of wagyu so meek that their return on investment is roughly in the territory of a savings bond.

Meanwhile, at a quiet Indian restaurant in the East 60s called Moti Mahal Delux, a bowl of lentils can make you go wobbly with happiness. The dish is called dal makhani, and it is an inky stew of spiced black lentils that have been coaxed into absorbing what feels like twice their own weight in salted butter imported from India. They are deeply, truly luxurious, a word I'm rarely tempted to use in the context of lentils.

It had been a while since I had considered just how indulgent vast quantities of butter can make a humble plate of lentils, but the great practitioners of North India's Mughlai cuisine never forgot. Mughlai food can be seductively rich and, with its wealth of spices and fresh ginger, spellbindingly aromatic. Heavily influenced by the Persian cuisine that was brought to the subcontinent by the Mogul emperors, the cooking of North India still has an imperial lavishness when cooked with care and consideration for ingredients, as it is at Moti Mahal Delux.

The restaurant, which opened in July, is itself an outpost of an empire, a chain centered in New Delhi that has built a formidable reputation among Indians for its tandoori chicken, butter chicken and that black-lentil dal. In fact, there seem to be two competing companies, each claiming a lineage with the original Moti Mahal founded in 1947 and each vying for rights to the name in New York City.

Lawyers may have to sort it out. Meanwhile, the rest of us can get down to the more serious business of rooting around the lengthy menu, paying particular attention to anything that passes through the tandoor oven. Its dry heat roasts papadum to a greaseless crisp and chases excess water from mushroom caps stuffed with herbs and cheese, leaving them tender and meaty.

The tandoor also imparts a winning smokiness to an unpromising-sounding snack of grilled pineapple, sweet potato, apple and bell pepper in a sweet-tart malt vinegar marinade that has a slowly mounting black-pepper buzz. Skewers of lamb called burrah kebab emerge from the tandoor coated with a thick and tangy marinade of yogurt, sour cream and lemon juice spiced with garam masala. These chops make you want to gnaw at the bone once the meat is gone.

The most eye-opening item to come out of the oven is tandoori chicken, a preparation said to have been introduced to restaurant dining by the original Moti Mahal. Justifiably, the dish and the restaurant became famous. Juicy despite its black streaks of char, the tandoori chicken at Moti Mahal Delux has a subtle heat and spice but does not have the quarter-inch of candy-red flesh that indicates the presence of food coloring. After tasting it, I thought of the restaurants where I had been served poor facsimiles of the dish and wanted to demand refunds from all of them.

“My whole point of taking this franchise was to get the recipe for their tandoori chicken,” said Gaurav Anand, the executive chef and an owner of Moti Mahal Delux, in a phone interview. “Because as a chef I've been thinking for so long: How do they make it? It's unbelievable.”

Mr. Anand, who was raised in New Delhi, obtained the recipe he coveted from the mother ship, along with several others on the menu that are denoted as Moti Mahal Delux signatures. They are all worth having, from the golden pakora fritters spiked with ground Kashmiri chiles to the fearsomely rich butter chicken to the crab masala in a dry and complex sauce made of tomatoes, onions and a garam masala blend supplied by the restaurant's New Delhi overlords. (A similar masala dish is made with goat brains.)

These dishes set high expectations that are not met by every item on the menu, which mixes Moti Mahal classics and Mr. Anand's own contributions. I was a bit mystified by the golgappa shots, four fried poori cups perched on different kinds of broth in shot glasses. You are meant to pour the broths into the poori, but they dribble out the bottom and don't add much in any case. Roomali khasta was another shot-glass appetizer, fried pastry cigars stuffed with mushrooms and standing in a sun-dried tomato dip that didn't leave much impression. And apart from the rice pudding, I was immune to the charms of the desserts.

A version of this review appeared in print on December 5, 2012, on page D6 of the New York edition with the headline: The Moguls Arrive, Bearing Butter.