How Family Recipes Have Preserved A Century-Old Culinary Legacy

It is past eight in the evening in Gali Kababian, and the queue outside Karim's first outlet near Delhi’s Jama Masjid has not thinned since lunch. By the restaurant's own count, around 3,000 people eat here on average every day, choosing from a platter of burras, kebabs, tikkas and curries. And as an afterthought the menu features dals and paneer dishes too.

Karim’s has been on every foodie's bucket list. In its own way it has become the Mecca of Mughlai cuisine in Delhi. And it isn’t an Insta-propelled trend. Zaeemuddin Ahmed, one of the restaurant directors, recalls a customer once telling him: "I used to come here with my grandfather, and now I come here with my grandson."

No celebrity endorsements, no full-page ads, just word-of-mouth marketing. And it has been like this since 1913, when Haji Karimuddin, once a cook serving the nobility, opened the first Karim Hotel in a narrow lane in the Jama Masjid neighbourhood. His ambition was to serve royal food to the common man.

Now, more than a hundred years later, his descendants—Zain-Ul-Abedin, Jalaluddin Akbar, Zaeemuddin Ahmed and Saifuddin (the current directors of Karim’s)—continue the tradition.

Pages of History

After 1857, when the British reprisals against Delhi's old order sent the city's Mughal-aligned families scattering, Karimuddin's forebears left the Red Fort neighbourhood, settling in what is today Farrukhnagar, in Ghaziabad district. They took up other jobs but the family did not let go of what it knew—the elaborate, slow-cooked grammar of Mughal-court cooking, passed from father to son as inheritance.

That inheritance found its commercial flowering in 1911, when Delhi hosted the great durbar, a commemorative event to mark the coronation of King George V, and the city filled with visitors from across the country. Karimuddin saw an opportunity there and opened a modest dhaba, selling just two dishes: aloo gosht and dal, with roomali roti.

Two years later, the dhaba morphed into a small restaurant called Karim Hotel, on the same lane where the flagship still stands, with the same aim of democratising royal cuisine.

Every generation at Karim's has added a layer to the menu without discarding the one before it, and Zaeemuddin Ahmed describes this almost like geological strata. "In our father's generation, roasted items were introduced, before that it was gravy items. Then, in my generation, grill items," he says.

It is a small technical detail but explains the restaurant’s philosophy. Each generation extends the heritage, the way an old house gets a new room built onto it without anyone tearing down the original walls.

All in the Family

That instinct, to add rather than replace shows up in how the family runs the business today. Around 35 cousins are part of the extended Karim family. The family holds regular weekend sit-downs, a kind of informal boardroom where decisions are taken collectively, the way they might have been made around a dinner table a century ago.

Akbar describes the extended clan as something closer to a single organism than a company. A family WhatsApp group where decisions get discussed long before they reach any formal meeting, and where the instinct is still to protect the whole rather than any one branch of it.

The core family group directly runs Karim’s more famous outlets in Old Delhi and Nizamuddin. There are others that are run by distant relatives, and some are franchisees. The numbers are modest by the standards of organised restaurant chains, and the family has kept it that way by design, staying close to its roots rather than chasing scale.

According to filings with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, compiled by business-data platform Tracxn, the two Delhi outlets reported revenues of ₹22cr for the financial year ending March 2025. The same filings showed a roughly 8% one-year decline and a steeper drop in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation.

If there is one sentence that explains why Karim's has survived a hundred years of Delhi's culinary churn, it is Jalaluddin Akbar's comment about trust. "Quality is very important for us. And so is trust. Ninety per cent of our customers are Hindu and they trust that if the menu says mutton, it will be bakra that’ll be served," he says. In a city where food fraud and adulteration are recurring anxieties, that trust is a fundamental part of the business.

It Starts in the Kitchen

Listening to Akbar talk about food, it becomes clear that at Karim's, the menu is also a kind of family philosophy, encoded in what gets cooked and for how long.

For one, the original recipes have remained untouched. To keep them from being copied, the family has developed a premix that the restaurant's cooks use without knowing the exact ingredients or their proportions.

Nihari and haleem, now treated as exotic dishes, were historically nothing of the sort. "Our elders say nihari and haleem used to be working-class food," Akbar says. There is an old saying the family still invokes about nihari: "Jo khaaye nihari, na usse dukh ho na bimari," meaning whoever eats nihari will have neither sorrow nor sickness. It sounds like a line straight out of a marketing book, but it is actually a piece of oral food culture that the family repeats as an inherited truth.

Korma and badam pasanda, by contrast, were dishes of the court: richer, showier, and reserved for those who could afford them. Karim's built its entire identity on serving both under one roof.

However, for any consumer food business, one big challenge is the rising health consciousness of customers, especially Gen Z. According to the National Restaurant Association's "2026 What's Hot" forecast report, diners are now prioritising healthier, functional drinks, and low- and no-alcohol options are growing in popularity, especially among Gen Z and millennials.

What does that mean for a brand like Karim's?

Ahmed argues that some dishes on the menu cater to health-conscious customers. One example is the tandoori chicken, which is chicken roasted with a mix of masalas and is a good source of protein with fewer calories. Akbar adds that their dishes are authentic and hence a healthier option. For example, he talks about butter chicken, arguably the most internationally recognisable Indian dish and one that Karim's has watched get diluted for decades.

"Today's version of butter chicken is not the authentic version of the dish," he says bluntly. "Real butter chicken is a tomato gravy with the roasted item put into it." This is a rebuke to the cream-heavy, over-sweetened version that has become the default in most restaurants today.

Handing Over the Baton

Health-conscious customers are not the only way Gen Z is part of the company's future. Another factor is succession, as the Gen-Z members are going to be the next owners of Karim's. The critical task for the next generation is to get into the nitty-gritty, learn the tricks and secrets of the trade, and put in the hours.

Akbar describes the kitchen as a test every young family member is still expected to pass. "Our elders didn't make us 'white collar'; we worked with cooks and helpers. We have to know how the kitchen works. If you don't, then how will you run a restaurant business?" he asks.

The family is also taking crucial steps to lay the foundation of a better-scaled business before handing it over to the next generation. One step in this direction is a plan to file a trademark in the UAE to ease foreign expansion. Karim Hotels is also open to bringing in venture capitalists and private investors to help scale the business before it is handed over to the next generation.

Ahmed frames the business less as an inheritance and more as a relay. "We have to make something for the next generation—it's a relay race. The fruit we're eating today, somebody laid the seeds before," he says.

That sense of custodianship rather than ownership is the philosophical bedrock. This same logic has governed the kitchen since 1913, that no single generation owns Karim's outright, each is simply responsible for handing it forward intact.

In the Gali Kababian outlet, that relay continues every single day. A younger cousin at the tandoor, watching an uncle judge ingredients by the eye rather than by measure, learning the one skill the family has always considered non-negotiable before it hands over anything else.