Butt Karahi is the one people wait for
Butt Karahi came third on our GTA reel, and the reviews make that ranking look cautious. People do not write a polite note and leave. They write about goat karahi, chicken karahi, and naan, then they mention the wait in the same breath. On Google the score sits around 4.7, and the pile is in the thousands. That is a lot of people agreeing on the same plate.
What a karahi actually is
The name is the pan. A karahi is a round, two-handled pot, closer to a wok than to the deep pot people picture when they say curry. The famous versions come from Peshawar and Lahore. Goat or chicken goes in with tomato, ginger, and green chile, and the sauce cooks down in the fat from the meat. Cream is not the point. Neither is a sweet tomato gravy. If a menu leads with butter chicken, you are in a different branch of North Indian cooking.
That other branch has a birthday people can point at. Butter chicken is widely credited to Moti Mahal in Delhi, where tandoori chicken met a tomato and butter sauce. Their site is still motimahal.in. London built a whole modern cafe culture around the softer side of this food. Dishoom is the famous one, and Indian Accent took the same family of flavors into tasting-menu rooms in Delhi and New York. A Mississauga karahi shop is not trying to be any of those. It is trying to be the pan.
The full ranking, with the other three places, is in the reel write-up. This page is just Butt Karahi, because the reviews are in a different league from a normal neighbourhood spot.
What people actually order
The goat karahi is the one that shows up the most. Reviewers talk about meat that is tender and a gravy that tastes like it cooked for a long time, not like it was thickened at the end. Chicken karahi gets the same kind of praise, a little milder. The naan is the other half of the meal. People say it is fresh, big, and worth ordering more of than you think you need. Fried fish and seekh kebab come up when someone wants a starter, and a lot of notes say the portions are generous.
It is halal Pakistani food in the Lahori karahi style. The menu is built around that pan, so if you go in wanting a quiet butter chicken, you are in the wrong room. The people who love it are the ones who wanted the karahi in the first place. For the softer plate, Copper Chimney on Avenue Road is the room we put first. For a Trinidadian counter on the way home from work, the second place on the reel was Lena's, written up with the other three.
The wait is the real review
The complaints are almost all about the room, not the food. It gets packed. It gets loud. On a weekend the wait can stretch toward an hour, and some people say the price feels high once you are standing there that long. A smaller set of reviews says a dish was off on a busy night. That is the honest version. The food is why the line exists, and the line is why some people swear they will not go back, then go back anyway.
If you can go on a weekday, or earlier than the dinner rush, the same kitchen is a lot easier to enjoy. Call ahead if you are bringing a group. Walking in at 7 on a Saturday and hoping for a quiet table is how the one-star notes get written.
Where to go
The original room people mean is on Winston Churchill Boulevard in Mississauga. There is also a spot in Ridgeway Plaza on Eglinton Avenue West, and one on Kingston Road in Pickering. The Butt Karahi site has the locations. The Google listing for the Winston Churchill shop is the one with the huge review pile. That Mississauga room is also listed on 1Mint.
We put them third on a list of four because the reel was about a spread of meals, not about who has the most reviews. If the question is who people will stand in line for, this is the answer. Copper Chimney was our first place for a different kind of dinner. Look either one up on places before you go, in case there is an offer sitting on the visit.