Kikli Gurugram opens with Punjab's lost recipes

Chef Amninder Sandhu has opened Kikli Gurugram, a second branch of her Punjabi restaurant, on the first floor of the AIPL Masterpiece complex in Sector 54.

The 60-seat room follows Kikli's original branch in Connaught Place, Delhi. There, Sandhu built a menu around what she calls Punjab's lost food: recipes carried across the 1947 Partition that rarely leave home kitchens, plus breads few restaurants outside the region still make.

The kitchen's centrepiece is a hara, a traditional Punjabi cooking setup fired by cow-dung cakes rather than gas or charcoal. It slow-cooks the malka dal for hours and gives the chicken and vegetable dishes a smoke that rural Punjab's home stoves produced long before restaurant kitchens existed.

A hara fired by cow dung, not gas, still shapes how this menu tastes.

A menu built on forgotten breads

Beyond the dal, the opening menu leans on dishes that rarely make it onto Punjabi restaurant cards: kadaiyaan lukeya chicken, satpura chaat, gobhi bharmi and chapli kebabs sit alongside nalli kachori and a kachalu salad. Breads carry as much weight as the mains. Mushki roti, a naturally fermented flatbread, and toonhi roti, which Sandhu calls a Punjabi cousin of Sindhi koki, both come from the same repertoire of home cooking she has spent years documenting, alongside dishes like Romy Gill's regional Indian menu in London.

Interiors, designed by Ariane Ginwala, borrow from chowk-poorana floor art, brass tableware and Phulkari embroidery motifs, a domestic register that suits the food's origins better than the glass-and-marble look common to Gurugram's newer dining rooms.

Gurugram gets its own Punjab reference point

A meal for two runs to around ₹2,000, roughly $24, in line with the Connaught Place original. The Gurugram branch keeps the same hours, open daily from noon to 3.30pm and 7pm to 11.30pm, under the kitchen team responsible for the Delhi menu's reputation among diners tracking regional Indian cooking beyond butter chicken and dal makhani.

Sandhu has spent much of the past decade cooking outside conventional restaurant settings, from open-fire kitchens to projects built around a single region's ingredients. Kikli's expansion suggests Punjab, treated as one homogenous cuisine on most Indian menus, still has dishes left to introduce to diners who think they already know it.