Chapli kabab: the flat Pashtun kebab of Peshawar and Takht Bhai

At a glance

• Chapli kabab (چپلي کباب) is a flat patty of minced beef or mutton, fried in a wide pan in animal fat and eaten with naan and a yoghurt or tomato dip. Dried pomegranate seeds and crushed coriander seed give it its taste. [2, 4]

• The name is most often explained from a Pashto word for "flat", given as chaprikh. The sandal explanation is also repeated, and Pashto has a word for a sandal that sounds almost the same. [1, 4, 12, 13]

• Dawn calls Takht Bhai in Mardan the probable birthplace, and cooks divide into a Takht Bhai school and a Peshawari school. Peshawar's Namak Mandi and Firdous are where its shops are best known. [6, 8, 9]

• In 2013 the Peshawar High Court banned an animal-fat oil called dhal from chapli kabab shops. In 2023 a Peshawar shop owner counted more than 3,500 chapli shops in the city. [6, 8]

• It is now sold far from Peshawar: in Islamabad, Karachi, Mansehra, Sharjah and London. [4, 7, 11, 12, 16]

What goes into it

Everyone who writes about chapli kabab agrees on the shape and the fat and disagrees about the flour. Shiza Malik, writing in Dawn in 2015, describes minced beef or lamb mixed with green chillies, tomatoes, pomegranate seeds, fresh coriander and mint and a little spice. [4] The SOCH Outreach Foundation's Google Arts & Culture story on the kebab in Karachi (its photographs are dated 2020) names two essential ingredients, dried pomegranate seeds (anardana) and coriander seed roasted and crushed, with tomato, onion, green chilli and coarse wheat flour. [2] In Karachi in 2023 Arab News counted cumin, carom seeds and dried coriander in the mix at A-One, and described the binder as maize flour. [11] Bisma Tirmizi's family recipe in Dawn, from her mother-in-law who grew up in Peshawar, uses four tablespoons of wholewheat flour to a pound of beef. [5] Sher Alam Shinwari wrote in Dawn in 2013 that some cooks use corn flour and far too much chopped onion, and that it spoils the flavour. [6]

So there is no single flour. Wheat and maize are both used, and a traditionalist's complaint is that too much of either, or of onion, thins the meat. Tirmizi writes that the Pakhtun recipe's mix of beef and flour is what makes the kabab lighter in taste. [5] Tirmizi calls it purely beef and at times lamb, and Alam Khan told Malik that Peshawar kebab makers more often use beef and those in Mardan buffalo. [4, 5] The Google Arts story adds one cook who crumbles an omelette into the mixture and tops each patty with fresh beef marrow. [2]

Shaping is part of the craft. In Sharjah the cook slaps the patty out by hand, presses a dimple into its middle so that it cooks evenly, and slides it into a pool of simmering oil at one end of the pan. [12] Malik describes the same thing in Islamabad: a vat set at a tilt, deep oil on one side, the patty laid on the dry glazed side and slid down into the bubbling fat. The finished kabab has a crisp, slightly burnt skin, sprinkled with a little spice. [4] The shop owner there, Alam Khan, whose father and grandfather had been kebab cooks in Peshawar, fried his in lamb fat over a wood fire, and said gas would take away the smoke that flavours it. [4]

The name

Dawn gives chaprikh, a Pashto word meaning flat, as the root of chapli. Both Malik and Tirmizi say so. [4, 5] Gulf News repeats it in 2021, and in Sharjah a cook whose father came from Kohat says it is called chapli "because it is made chapta", flattened. [12] The Tribune's food columnist Pushpesh Pant, writing in 2022, gives the Pashto as chapleek, "flat or flattened", and says the sandal story is a trap that people fall into because Peshawar is also known for hand-made chappals. [13]

The sandal story is not made up from nothing. Pashto has its own word for a sandal that sounds almost the same. Raverty's dictionary of 1860 lists chaplay as "sandals made of leather or grass". [1] Gulf News notes that many people connect the kabab with chappal because of its size and shape, a sole, and Google Arts says the name is said to come from chaprikh but may also come from the word for sandals. [2, 12] A shop name shows how the two words mix. Faisal Quraishi in Dawn in 2022 describes a restaurant at Icherrian in Mansehra district called "Muhammad Zaman & Khaista Khan Ke Mashhoor Chappal Kebab". [7] When the German ambassador Alfred Grannas asked on Twitter in 2022, with a slipper emoji, where the name came from, the most reliable answer in Aaj News's roundup was the columnist Mohammad Taqi's: it means flat, which separates it from the sausage-shaped seekh kabab. [14] The same roundup quotes one user's guess that a typing error turned a local word for the knee bone into chapli, which has no source behind it. [14]

None of these sources says where chaprikh is found in a Pashto dictionary, and none quotes an old text for either explanation. What can be said is that every explanation, the flat one and the sandal one, describes the same shape.

Takht Bhai and Peshawar

Dawn's 2015 feature says Peshawar may be the kebab capital of the world, but the chapli kabab is thought to have started in Takht Bhai, in Mardan district. It adds that cooks now divide into two schools, one linked to Takht Bhai and the other practising the Peshawari method. [4] Sher Alam Shinwari looked back in 2013 to "the good old days" when Takht Bhai Kabab in Mardan, Bakhshu Pul Kabab, Taru Kabab and Turay Kabab drew locals and visitors. [6] The Safdar Hotel at Takht Bhai says on its own website that it has been serving since 1935 and that its chapli kabab is at the centre of the menu. That is the hotel's claim, with no date from any outside source. [15]

Peshawar's shops are better documented. Jalil Kabab House opened in 1950 in Peshawar's Firdous, according to Shinwari's 2013 article, and drew about a thousand diners a day, with as many again ordering delivery, and branches in Hayatabad, Gulbahar, Charsadda and Islamabad. Its manager told him that visitors took its kababs to Dubai and other countries as gifts. [6] In 2023 Arif Ahmad of Jalil Ahmad's family told the Associated Press of Pakistan that his grandfather began with a single frying pan 73 years before, that the business now stretches across Peshawar and to Islamabad, and that the city has more than 3,500 chapli kabab shops, in Firdous, Bakhshu Bridge, Warsak Road, Ring Road, Namak Mandi and other markets. [8] Shinwari had counted "more than 2,000" in and around the city ten years earlier. The two figures are a shopkeeper's and a journalist's estimates, not a count. [6, 8]

Namak Mandi, the salt market, is the food street people name first. In 2025 Nisar Khan, called Charsi, a third-generation seller there, told APP that his father began with one karahi about fifty years earlier, and that the kabab at Namak Mandi comes with hot naan and a sharp chutney. [9] AFP's 2019 report on the street named Tory Kebab House, with four branches in the city, where the rush comes on cold winter days. [10] The existing article on Pashtun food and the table of hospitality describes the street's other dishes, and Peshawar covers the city.

In Charsadda, Jalil's has a branch, and Charsadda Road is among the places Shinwari lists where the kabab is sold. [6] Charsadda itself is in Charsadda and Hashtnagar.

Arif Ahmad also told APP that "invaders" stayed in the Peshawar region on the way to central India and brought the recipe. [8] That is his account, with no source behind it. Dawn's Tirmizi offers a similar story, that Turkish and Persian soldiers grilled meat wrapped on their swords, but puts it as belief about kababs in general and calls the chapli "a purely Pakhtun take on the kabab". [5]

Fat, a court order and a price

Chapli kabab is fried in animal fat in the shops people respect. Faisal Quraishi, in Dawn in 2022, says most famous eateries cook it in animal fat that is melted first and that vegetable oil or ghee takes away the taste and smell. [7] The 2013 case was about a cheaper fat. After a hearing on 19 September 2013, Chief Justice Dost Mohammad Khan of the Peshawar High Court banned the use of "fats oil (oil made from animal fat), or dhal in local jargon" in chapli kabab, after complaints of stomach illness and a suo motu notice on 10 September. Peshawar's ration controller told Dawn that kebab would be cooked in cooking oil or pure ghee only. [6] The Islamabad cook Alam Gul, from Mardan, told Dawn in 2015 that he used vegetable oil because in Islamabad "people would never prefer" food fried in fat. [4]

Shinwari wrote that kebab was once a poor man's dish and was becoming a luxury because of what the ingredients cost. In 2013 a kilo of Jalil's special chapli kabab sold for Rs360 and the ordinary one for Rs340. [6]

The Afghan side

Tirmizi says the former NWFP and eastern Afghanistan can both claim the dish. [5] The SOCH story says it emerged from the North-West Frontier Province and the adjoining parts of Afghanistan. [2] Tirmizi and the SOCH story both argue that its pomegranate and coriander seeds are local to Afghanistan and northern Pakistan. [2, 5] The Peshawar shopkeeper in the 2023 report said the recipe also became popular in Jalalabad and Kabul. [8] Malik's account has the kabab eaten with Kandahari nan. [4] The city is described in Jalalabad.

How it is eaten

Dawn's 2013 feature says it is served with salad and naan, sometimes with Kabuli palaw, green tea in winter and cold drinks in summer. Khayal Mohammad, whom Dawn calls a Pashto ghazal maestro, told Shinwari that on Eid at the hujra the family prepares chapli kabab for guests. The film star Ajab Gul and the politician Bushra Gohar named it as their first pick in Peshawar. [6] Malik's version is a hot piece of Kandahari nan and a yoghurt-based chutney, and the cook's tomato chutney resembles salsa. [4] On the third day of Eid in 2023 people queued at Namak Mandi, and one professor from Swabi University bought five kilograms for a party at home. [8] The hujra and melmastia articles explain why a dish like this is cooked for guests.

Leaving home

Chapli kabab is now sold far from Peshawar. Alam Khan and Alam Gul were selling it at Peshawar Mor in Islamabad in 2015, and Dawn says the best-known place there, Sufi Restaurant, was opened about 32 years earlier by Sufi Khan from Nowshera. [4] In Karachi, A-One in Shah Faisal Colony grew from a small shop of the 1980s started by Haji Gohar Rahman, and its manager said its first chef, Saeed Khan, then 95, brought the recipe from Peshawar. Customers of every community eat there, and one sends 6 kg of uncooked mix to a brother in Dubai. [11] Dawn's Quraishi, who had come from Karachi, found the Mansehra shop's kabab unlike anything he had eaten at Karachi's Sohrab Goth or at Namak Mandi. [7]

In the Gulf, Hafeez Al Rahman of Al Ashiyah Cafeteria in Sharjah told Gulf News in 2021 that his father, Mohammad Luqman, came from Kohat in 1974 to work in a butcher's shop, saw other Pathans working there who wanted a good kabab at a low price, and recreated the home recipe, selling it from 1997 for 3 dirhams, now 5. He said his father wanted every musafir, traveller, to have a good meal. [12] The Pashtuns today article gives the wider figures for migration to Karachi and the Gulf.

In Britain a Wikimedia Commons photograph shows a chapli kabab served in a Birmingham Balti restaurant [3], and the London restaurant guide The Infatuation in 2024 reviewed Taste of Pakistan near Heathrow, a Pashtun restaurant whose Peshawari chapli kebab it called "frisbee-shaped with crispy edges". [16]