Last updated September 2026
Order a butter chicken pizza in Rome and you will get a long look. Order one in Invercargill and nobody blinks. It sits on menus between the meat lover and the Hawaiian as though it has always been there, and for most New Zealanders under about forty, it has.
★View the Best Pizza in Invercargill→It is worth asking how that happened, because the answer says something about how New Zealanders actually eat, and because the dish is more technically interesting than its reputation suggests.
Where it came from
Butter chicken itself is not ancient. The usual account traces it to Delhi in the 1950s, where leftover tandoori chicken was reheated in a tomato, butter and cream sauce so it would not dry out. A dish invented to rescue yesterday’s roast turns out to travel extremely well.
It reached New Zealand through the same route as most of our Indian food, in restaurants opened by families who had arrived from India and the Pacific, and it became a national favourite fast. Mild, rich, faintly sweet and not remotely challenging, it was the curry that people who did not eat curry would eat.
The pizza version is a New Zealand and Australian invention, and it appeared for a straightforward commercial reason. Takeaway kitchens here have never been purist. If a pizza oven and a curry base are both on the premises, someone will eventually put one on the other, and if it sells, it stays. It sold.
Why the combination actually works
It is easy to be sniffy about it. It is harder to explain why so many people order it twice.
Butter chicken sauce does the same job on a pizza that a good tomato base does, which is to carry fat, acid and sweetness at once. It is tomato-based to start with. The cream rounds it out, the ground spices give it a length that a plain tomato sauce does not have, and the sugars in it caramelise under a hot oven in a way that tastes deliberate rather than accidental.
Mozzarella is a mild, salty, high-moisture cheese that mostly exists to be a texture. It does not fight the spice. Coriander and red onion on top bring back the freshness the oven takes out.
The combination is not a novelty. It follows the same logic as any pizza that works: a sauce with acidity, a fat to carry it, something salty, something fresh.
What separates a good one from a bad one
This is where most of them fall over, and it is nearly always the same three things.
Too much sauce. Butter chicken sauce is far wetter than a standard pizza base sauce, and it is the fastest way to a soggy middle. A good one is sauced sparingly, and you should be able to pick up a slice without it folding in half.
Sweetness with nothing behind it. A lot of commercial butter chicken sauce is sugar first and spice a distant second. On a plate you can hide that with rice. On a pizza there is nowhere to hide, and it reads as dessert. The good versions keep some warmth and a bit of acidity.
Chicken that was cooked twice badly. The chicken should be cooked before it goes on, then finished in the oven. Raw chicken added to a pizza in the hope the oven sorts it out gives you either dry meat or an undercooked centre.
A useful test if you are trying somewhere new: a kitchen that also makes its own curries is more likely to treat the sauce as a sauce rather than as a squeeze bottle.
The wider point about Indian-influenced pizza
Butter chicken gets the attention, but it is not the only one worth ordering.
Peri peri chicken works for the same reasons and is considerably less sweet, which suits people who find butter chicken cloying. Tandoori-spiced toppings do well because the spice mix is dry, so it seasons without waterlogging the base. Paneer is genuinely good on a pizza, holding its shape under heat instead of melting away, and it gives vegetarians something more interesting than the usual pile of capsicum.
If you have written off the Indian end of a pizza menu, that is the section to look at rather than the butter chicken.
Ordering it in Invercargill
For a city of its size, Invercargill has a reasonable spread of independent pizza kitchens, which matters here because this is a pizza that chains tend to do badly and small kitchens tend to do well. The difference is usually whether someone is making the sauce or opening it.
If you are ordering for a group and one person is wary, butter chicken is the reliable middle ground. It is the pizza that people who say they do not like curry will eat happily, and it means you do not have to order two mild pizzas to keep the peace.
Where to try one locally
Invercargill Pizzeria on Windsor Street is a family-run kitchen whose most ordered pizzas include butter chicken and peri peri chicken, alongside paneer for anyone after a vegetarian option. The menu runs well past pizza into pasta, ribs and lamb shank, the dining room is licensed, and the same food goes out for pickup and delivery across town.
