باب بریانی
The handi was sealed.
Then the world stopped.
An underdog story in four chapters — one kitchen, one recipe, one handi, and the friends who kept the phone ringing when nobody else did.
2019 — One handi, no signboard worth its name
Before any of us had heard the word “lockdown”, a single handi was sealed in a back-galli kitchen in Sangam Vihar. The board outside read The Biryani Kingz. No Instagram, no aggregator listing — just a phone number passed between neighbours, and a recipe carried down from Lucknow by an uncle who refused to write it down. The kitchen was the size of a car. The Ustad — Khalid Neyazi, our head chef to this day — worked alone.
2020 — The world stopped, the dough seal stayed unbroken
Then the phone stopped ringing. For months the dough seal on the handi stayed unbroken — there was nobody to serve. We almost didn’t make it back. The handful of regulars who kept ordering through Covid — the friends who became family — were the reason we did. Some of them still order, six years on. We never forget who was there in 2020.
2021–2025 — Smaller, then steadier
We came back smaller, then steadier. Same kitchen on Gali No. 1. Same Ustad at the dum. Same recipe from Lucknow. But we were tired of being a stall — of being one bad month away from closing the shutter again. We wanted to grow without losing the handi. To become a brand, not a chain. So we did something most small biryani houses don’t: we paired the kitchen with a small team of engineers. We built our own ordering, our own customer list, our own way of staying close to the people who eat with us — instead of renting a corner of someone else’s app and giving away the relationship at the end of every receipt.
May 2026 — A new door
By May 2026 we’d outgrown The Biryani Kingz. We searched through more than a hundred names — too cute, too borrowed, too corporate, too nothing. None fit. Then Baab E Biryani showed up out of nowhere — “the door to biryani” — and it was love at first sight. The handi we sealed in 2019 is the handi we serve from today. We just changed the signboard.
Khalid Neyazi,
the Ustad at the dum.
Khalid has been at the fire since the first handi in 2019. He was the one working alone in the car-sized kitchen, the one who kept the dough seal unbroken through 2020, and the one who still checks every handi before it leaves. Nobody here calls him chef. The kitchen calls him Ustad.
He cooks in pure ghee — never palm oil, never refined oil — and he would rather sell fewer handis than change that. When a customer wrote that his biryani had “shafa” (healing) in it, he went quiet for a while. Then he went back to the stove.
“My dream is not a big one. Whoever eats my biryani — at a wedding, at an office lunch, at home on a Sunday — should get up from the table happy. Bas. That is the whole dream.”
“People ask me for the secret. There is none. Good rice, good meat, pure ghee, whole spices, and the patience to leave the handi sealed when every part of you wants to open it and check.”
“When someone messages to say the whole family fought over the last plate, I keep that message. Those messages are my real salary. The money is just the money.”
One handi. One Ustad. One recipe from Lucknow with a garnish of Hyderabad.
We’ll grow — but not at the cost of the handi.
Ready to order
Bulk & party orders only. Same handi.