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 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.
“Biryani is patience.
Everything else is just rice.”
Ready to order
Bulk & party orders only. Same handi.