Lawson Premium | Lemon Butter Chicken

Butter Chicken is an Indian dish known as Murgh Makhani that is originally from Delhi. There’s an undiscovered country in experimenting with dishes if you haven’t tried anything outside Filipino food. A convenience store like Lawson likes to take risks in taking that chance and rolling with it if people would gravitate to it. But if the individual have known what a Buttered Chicken looks like, this is not what you’d expect. At first glance, it looked more like sliced chunks of chicken with an unknown sauce and the texture appeared to be not the kind of red-to-brownish sauce that makes an actual Buttered Chicken, but curiosity leads to what this food is about.

In a context for those who never had an actual Buttered Chicken the sauce used for it is peanut butter and curry mixed and it appears to be a stew, but it is very different from conventional stew. Lawson is trying to pass this new dish they introduced as Buttered Chicken when the appearance is deceiving.

But to be honest, the name is confusing to be called “Lemon Butter Chicken” and when someone who knows what a Butter Chicken looks like that includes the smell and texture it is an entirely different dish. Lawson has this “Lemon Butter Chicken” as they claimed to be something of their original recipe.

Rectangular Tub Container

Interesting enough to see that it is not related to the Indian dish because they added “Lemon” in it that you can see in the packaging. The container is a step-up similar to the ones for the rice meals at Shopwise Grocery using just a straight-up rectangular shape with no slanted bottom that other convenience stores try to pass up and cheat their customers about food portions by the container’s shape.

This was first found late in December 2023, and it was surprisingly scarce to find this one being not very stocked. It also means the product is getting quite the attention for being a unique dish not commonly seen in their stores. The upgrade on the microwaveable tub is an improvement to just the black tubs that look cheap for them to be having that instead of looking cheap with the usual plastic containers.

Lemon Auesthetics

Now to the dish, it is a Lemon Butter Chicken, and the Lemon that came with it is purely for an ornament look because of the thin slice not getting enough lemon juice to be squeezed for the dish. You have to make the customers provide other alternatives like Calamansi instead of trying to look fancy when you realize the sliced lemon is useless for cutting costs.

Not enough “butter” in it and it looked like a barbecue sauce rather than actual curry with a peanut butter sauce that didn’t even remotely look, smell, or taste like the Buttered Chicken. The sauce that came with it is not even barbecue, but it does give flavour to the chunks of sliced chicken. But not good enough for the way it was marketed to be a Buttered Chicken that most Indians are familiar with.

Overall, the expectation was very high for this one, and it wasn’t that terrible. The term and the appearance of this dish were a bit confusing to expect a Butter Chicken, and this is a different type of dish that held on its own. Sometimes, the idea of a dish to name it close to the one that is known is misleading. But it is not the Buttered Chicken from India. It is something of a different dish that is just fine, and not as memorable as an actual Butter Chicken dish.

The thinly sliced lemon is no use and it is just a fruit ornament to keep the vibe of having a Lemon on a Butter Chicken. At the end of the day, the food was just good, but not great. They could have come up with a different name because it is confusing when the actual Buttered Chicken was WAY BETTER.

• Food Quality: 3.5 out of 5
• Affordability: B+
• Overall: Confusion with the use of the name "Butter Chicken" when it does not even have Peanut Butter Sauce.

Lemon Butter Chicken | Retailed at: ₱ 115.00 Pesos [$ 3.10 AUD | $ 2.07 USD]**

** - Currency Converter via Google.com