Karahi and tikka: the grill and the pan of Peshawar

At a glance

• Karahi is meat cooked fast in a wok-shaped iron pan, and the dish takes its name from the pan. Tikka is meat grilled on skewers over charcoal. In Peshawar, in Landi Kotal and in the restaurants that copy them, both are made with little more than salt, green chilli and the animal's own fat. [1, 3, 9]

• Dawn's Bisma Tirmizi names Landi Kotal, the Shinwari and Afridi town at the top of the Khyber Pass, as the historical home of karahi gosht. She gives no document for it, and the stories others tell are tradition. [1, 2]

• Dawn's Sher Alam Shinwari writes the Pashtun name of grilled meat as wreeta and says most people call it Da Shinwaru tikkay, "the Shinwari's tikka". [3]

• In 2019 Landi Kotal bazaar had ten tikka and karahi restaurants. Six closed after Afghan sheep stopped coming through Torkham. [4]

• Restaurants called "Shinwari" now fill streets in Rawalpindi and Islamabad. Owners say the name is used by many who have nothing to do with the tribe. [6, 7]

The pan and the grill

Tirmizi, a former Dawn staff writer, says karahi gosht is named after the utensil, a heavy-based, round, wok-like pot, and that the pot called a balti elsewhere is called a karahi in southern Pakistan. [1] The dish is small cubes of lamb or goat cooked in tomatoes, green chillies, salt and, if possible, animal fat, and eaten straight from the pan with hot naan. [1]

Tikka is a different method on the same meat. The Dawn reporter who visited the Shinwari restaurants of Rawalpindi in 2014 describes lamb cut small, wrapped in fat, skewered and cooked on glowing coals, with salt and spice scattered on just before serving. [6] The two dishes share a rule that every writer here repeats: the flavour is the meat and its fat, with almost nothing added.

The grilled meat of the Pashtun tribes has its own word, wreeta. Sher Alam Shinwari, a Dawn correspondent in Peshawar, called it "grilled meat" and "one of the most popular traditional tribal foods" in 2015. [3] The Pashto spelling is not given in any of the reports used here.

Landi Kotal and the Shinwari tradition

Landi Kotal sits close to Afghanistan on top of the Khyber Pass, and Tirmizi writes that the Shinwari and Afridi tribes come from there and that it is "considered to be the historical home of the balti or karahi gosht". [1] Her own route to the dish was through her father. On a work trip he went to Landi Kotal and brought back the recipe, which she published in 2014: meat braised on a high flame with green chillies and salt, tomatoes added after a few minutes, and everything cooked until the tomato juice has almost gone. [1] She says the dish travelled from Landi Kotal to Punjab and "then the rest of the world". [1] The Khyber Pass and Afridi articles describe the country.

The Express Tribune heard a fuller story in Peshawar in 2017. It says the man holding the skewers at Namak Mandi is almost always a Shinwari, and that tikka karahi and mutton barbecue are counted Shinwari specialities around Landi Kotal, where the tribe is largely settled. [2] A cook there, Shad Muhammad Shinwari, told the paper that his grandfather said Shinwari camel herders were once the only people who ate sheep, and that Peshawari townspeople laughed at the highlanders for it. [2] The same paper says the Shinwari were traders and carriers who took camels along the Afghan roads to Bukhara and Kashgar. [2] Shad Muhammad's second story is about the salt market. Camel caravans carried the salt, Shinwari men ran them, and some set up stalls selling mutton to their own people. Adventurous local people tried it, he said, and a food market grew that is now called Namak Mandi. [2] That is one cook's account. The Tribune's Hidayat Khan gave a different one in 2014: the market takes its name from the region's salt trade and was once Mewamandi, the fruit market. [8]

Not everyone in Peshawar gives the prize to Namak Mandi. Wahid Khan, another local quoted in the same 2017 article, said Landi Kotal is the real home of mutton karahi and that it tastes better than the Namak Mandi version because Landi Kotal cooks use local sheep and cook only in the sheep's tallow. [2] No writer used here cites a dated record for where karahi began. What the sources do show is a dish people in Peshawar, Landi Kotal and Rawalpindi all link to the Shinwari.

What goes in the pan

The disagreement is mostly about tomatoes. Wahid Khan told the Tribune that the traditional karahi has no spices and no tomatoes and is cooked in its own fat, and that visitors from Punjab now insist on tomatoes and red chilli. [2] Tirmizi's family recipe uses tomatoes. [1] The Rawalpindi Shinwari cooks said they used no spices, only yoghurt, tomatoes, green chilli and ginger, with black pepper added to taste. [6] At the Charsi Tikka branch in Islamabad's Saidpur Village in 2016 the karahi was diced meat tossed in a wok with tomatoes, green chillies, garlic, stock and animal fat, with salt, and cooked over charcoal for about an hour. [10] AFP described the Namak Mandi version in 2019 as slices of mutton in chunks of white fat cut from the sheep's rump, with sparing green chilli and tomato. [9]

The animal matters as much as the seasoning. Nasir, who owns one of the Namak Mandi restaurants, told the Tribune that the local Watani sheep of the mountain districts taste best and the larger Balkhi sheep carry more meat. He said his kitchen kills only rams. [2] Wahid Khan added that restaurant cooks never wash the meat, because water is believed to take the taste away. [2] Tirmizi writes that with fresh meat from an Eid sacrifice the animal's own fat should be enough and no oil is needed. [1] Landi Kotal's cooks depend on a steady supply. Dawn reported in 2019 that one restaurant had killed 18 to 20 sheep a day before the ban on Afghan livestock, and three or four after it. [4]

Imran Khan, a development consultant who writes about Pashtun food and is quoted by the food writer Maryam Jillani, says lamb is preferred in the north-west and goat becomes the default further south-east. [7] Namak Mandi's tikka shops also put chicken on display. [8] Karahi is sold by weight. In 2017 the Tribune quoted a regular who orders half a kilo of mutton in a karahi, enough for one man, and a price of Rs1,000 a kilogram. [2]

Tikka on the charcoal

Sher Alam Shinwari's 2015 report in Dawn describes the grilling in detail. Its recipe is "fresh ram meat and salt", and no spices. [3] Rajuddin Khan Shinwari, 65, from Landi Kotal, who ran his own wreeta restaurant on Peshawar's Ring Road, described the work. Ten to 15 pieces of red meat and fat are threaded on a three-foot steel bar. The bars go over burning charcoal for six to ten minutes, a light salting follows once the meat reddens, and a gap of at least two inches is kept between bars and coals so the meat does not burn. A hand fan keeps the coals even, and the pieces are reshuffled on the bar. The cooked meat is slid off into a pan set briefly on the coals to draw out the last moisture. [3]

Another Namak Mandi cook, Shiraz Shah, said grilling takes about 40 minutes on a steel grate. He remembered five wreeta restaurants in the market when he was young and counted 35 open roadside ones in 2015. [3] Abdur Razaq, a barbecue expert from Mohmand working at Namak Mandi, said he had introduced wreeta to a five-star restaurant in Dubai three decades earlier. [3] Shah named the Shinwari, Afridi and Mohmand as the tribes with the skill and said the food began in the tribal areas centuries ago. [3] That is his account, with no document.

Wreeta is served with raita, salad and tandoori bread, and green tea follows. [3] The Dawn writer adds a second dish from the same grill, patty tikkay, liver wrapped in dried fat. The liver is grilled whole for about 30 minutes, cut into rounds, wrapped in strips of fat and put back for about ten minutes. [3] Charsi Tikka in Islamabad sells it as patta tikka ("hidden tikka"), liver rubbed with salt and garlic and wrapped in stomach fat, grilled for 15 minutes a side and served on its skewer. [10] There the namkeen tikka is dusted with coarse salt, turned every few minutes, brushed lightly with ghee and ready after about 45 minutes, with tandoori bread and mint sauce. [10]

The Rawalpindi account adds a second kind. Shoulder tikka is marinated in yoghurt, spices, chilli and salt and cooked on 24-inch skewers. [6] So the salt-only tikka of the Shinwari tradition sits beside a marinated one on the same menus.

Grilled meat is also an Eid and guest dish. Sher Alam Shinwari writes that tribal people offer a ram to a guest and that on most occasions rams are slaughtered and grilled over charcoal, and that families stock fresh meat for wreeta at Eid al-Adha and carry it to picnic spots. [3] The melmastia article explains the guest's claim, and the hujra article describes where such meals were eaten.

Namak Mandi and Charsi Tikka

The namkeen and dumpukht article covers the salt dishes of Namak Mandi. Three further points concern the grill. In 2014 Hidayat Khan of the Tribune counted more than 30 tikka shops on the food street, with lamb at Rs800 a kilogram, each claiming to serve the authentic dish. [8] AFP in 2019 said Nisar Charsi Tikka went through about two dozen sheep a day, that regular customers order by the kilo and guide the butchers to their cut, and that an order takes close to an hour. [9] And Jillani reports that Imran Khan credits Charsi Tikka with making Shinwari food known across Pakistan, although the shop is not branded as Shinwari. [7] The shop's name is a nickname. The Tribune and AFP tell it as the owner's or his father's habit of smoking charas, and Jillani says friends gave it to the owner. [7–9]

Nisar Khan told APP in 2025 that his father began with one karahi, a pan, about fifty years earlier, and that he later opened three shops in Firdous, University Road and Bakhshu Charsadda Road. [14] The chapli kabab article tells what that pan fried.

Qissa Khwani

The Qissa Khwani bazaar is better known for its tea houses than for its grills, and the green tea and qehwa article describes them. The food shops around it sell what the city sells. APP's Peshawar reporters listed chapli kabab, paye, mutton karahi, fried fish, chicken roast and Kabuli palaw at Iftar parties in the bazaar in 2023, and in 2024 listed barbecue, chapli kabab, paye and mutton karahi from morning until late at night. [11, 12] A travel blogger who walked the bazaar in 2017 found beef tikkas frying at lunchtime and naan being carried from the neighbouring tandoor. [13] APP's 2025 survey of Peshawar's food adds nehari, rice palaw and haleem to the late-night menu. [14]

Landi Kotal today

Dawn's Khyber correspondent Ibrahim Shinwari wrote in August 2019 that six of the ten restaurants offering traditional mutton tikka and karahi in Landi Kotal bazaar had closed because Afghan livestock could no longer cross at Torkham. [4] The four that stayed open had cut their mutton sales by almost 80 percent, because the local market could not supply good enough meat, and the chef Islam Yar said his shop now finished at 11 in the morning rather than working from dawn to dusk. [4]

The tikka is part of how people in Landi Kotal remember going out. In 2024 Sher Alam Shinwari reported on a tea shop in the bazaar that dates from the 1920s. Its fourth-generation owner, Barkat Gul, said the elders, poets and writers of the Khyber Adabi Jirga, led by Ameer Hamza Khan Shinwari, used to meet there in the 1950s and 1960s. [5] Gul Zardan Kaka, aged 85, said he used to visit the shop after eating the traditional Shinwari tikka, wreetha, and that green tea is taken after food in the region. [5] The Hamza Shinwari article is about the poet who led that circle.

Shinwari restaurants beyond the Khyber

Dawn's reporter in Rawalpindi wrote in December 2014 that the story goes that all the Pashtun restaurants of Peshawar were once owned by Shinwari, and that when demand grew many imitators opened overnight and nearly all used the Shinwari name. [6] Shinwari restaurants, it said, lined the road from The Mall to Marir Chowk, where a diner is charged by the quantity of meat ordered and can have it as karahi, tikka, kebab or chops, at charpoys and tables set out in the open. [6] Two it names are Saltish Shinwari on Haider Road and New Shinwari on Kashmir Road. [6] A worker at New Shinwari, Mohammad Khan, told the paper there were few actual Shinwari-owned restaurants left, and that some shops hang lamb outside and borrow the name. [6]

Jillani, writing for GOYA in 2021, found the same thing in Islamabad. A biryani shop near her home had become a Shinwari restaurant, and within five years the city had a "sea" of them serving one item, lamb. [7] Gulab Khan, co-owner of Khyber Shinwari Restaurant, said: "There are more Shinwari restaurants than there are Shinwari people". His maternal uncle started it in the 1990s, and he says it is one of the few, if not the only one, in Islamabad owned by Shinwari themselves. [7] Khan describes the three dishes of the Shinwari table as tikka, karahi and dum pukht, lamb cooked slowly in a large pot sealed with flour, and says the meat has to be drained, dried and aged for at least one to two weeks. [7] That contradicts the Rawalpindi cook, who said the meat hung only six to eight hours so that it cooked easily on coal. [6] Niamat Sati, co-owner of Sufi Shinwari in Islamabad, told her their sales tripled when they changed from a biryani restaurant to a Shinwari one around 2014. [7]

Jillani gives two reasons for the spread. The journalist Nusrat Javeed told her that Shinwari are mostly traders and businessmen from Landi Kotal, beside the biggest border crossing between Afghanistan and Pakistan, who opened small restaurants and motels for travellers, so that outsiders knew the food long before restaurants appeared in the cities. [7] She adds that the displacement of Pashtuns from the tribal belt from 2008 onward, during the militancy and army operations there, carried the food further. [7]

She also records a Pashtun objection. Nilofer Qazi, who runs the video series Pakistan on a Plate, told her that most of the province's cooking happens at home, in women's hands, and that restaurants default to meat because it is quick and cannot be made at home by most Pakistanis. She named gujjay salan, a sorrel curry also eaten in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, as a dish nobody talks about. [7] For the foods of the hujra and the kitchen, the Pashtun food and the table of hospitality article is a better guide, and Pashtuns in Karachi describes where many of those who cook this food have settled.