How the Cricket Club of India accidentally invented the famous Indo-Chinese Manchurian dish

Most people meet Manchurian at a roadside cart: woks blazing, ladles clanging, red sauce catching the light. Hard to imagine its first act played out in a quiet, members-only dining room. It began not with a recipe, but with an instinct to mix Indian comfort with Chinese technique. Yet the story begins at the Cricket Club of India in Mumbai, where a young cook named Nelson Wang improvised a dish that would go on to reshape India’s relationship with Chinese food. Scroll down to know more...

A chef, dare, and a dish
The mid-1970s was an era when “Chinese cuisine” was only just finding its way onto Indian menus. At the CCI, one afternoon, a diner asked Wang to serve “something different.” He began with the familiar base of chopped ginger, garlic and green chilli sizzling in hot oil. But then he veered away from the predictable. No garam masala, no turmeric. Instead, he poured in soy sauce, added a splash of stock, and finished with cornflour to bind everything in a glossy coat.


To complete it, he fried nuggets of chicken until crisp and folded them into the sauce. The plate that went out was fiery, salty, tangy - recognisable yet new. The name “Manchurian” was not about geography at all, but about theatre: exotic enough to sound Chinese, catchy enough to stick in Bombay’s dining circles.

From white linen to neon signboards
The Cricket Club’s polished teak tables and crisp napkins may seem an unlikely birthplace for street food, but word of the dish slipped out quickly. When Wang opened China Garden a few years later, Chicken Manchurian moved with him. Soon it was on restaurant menus, banquet spreads, college canteen counters and roadside stalls.

The format was too tempting not to adapt. Gobi for vegetarians. Paneer for the dairy-loving. Fish and prawn for seafood fans. Each version followed the same formula: fry for crunch, sauce for punch, finish with spring onion for brightness. A club-born experiment had turned into a national obsession.

Why it clicked with India


Manchurian worked because it spoke to the Indian palate. Its crisp batter and fried texture echoed pakoras. Its sauce struck the familiar triad of spicy, tangy and just a touch sweet - the same notes that power chaat and street snacks. Soy sauce brought depth, cornflour gave sheen, and the whole dish could be pulled together in minutes.

Even better, it was endlessly adaptable. It could arrive “dry,” skewered on toothpicks for party chatter, or as a glossy gravy ladled over fried rice. Each cook could adjust chilli, ginger or vinegar to taste. Manchurian was less of a recipe and more of a mood - one that could bend to the table in front of it.

The myth and the memory
Like many food origin stories, this one survives more in memories than in written archives. Some details blur, but what remains clear is that Nelson Wang’s cooking defined what Indian-Chinese would become. His improvisation at the Cricket Club gave the cuisine its headline act. Whether every detail is fact or folklore hardly matters. The legend is woven into the way India eats today.

A last image to hold

Today, when you spear a golden ball of gobi Manchurian or scoop chicken Manchurian gravy onto fried rice, you’re tasting more than soy and chilli. You’re tasting a story that began not in the provinces of China but on the sidelines of an Indian cricket field - a dish born of instinct, claimed by appetite, and proudly adopted by India as its own.