Rani Mahal
Freshly baked garlic naan with butter and cilantro from Rani Mahal

July 20, 2026 · By Rani Mahal Culinary Team

What Is Naan, Really? (And How It's Different From Roti and Chapathi)

Naan, roti, and chapathi all show up on Indian menus, but they're not interchangeable. Here's the real difference, and which bread to order with which dish.

Our bread section alone has close to ten options, which is a lot to sort through if you didn't grow up eating any of them. Here's the short version: naan, roti, and chapathi are all Indian breads, but they're made differently, they taste different, and they're suited to different dishes.

Naan

Tandoor Clay Oven

Baked Against 900°F Clay

Slapped onto the wall of the tandoor

Watch our tandoor chef slap leavened naan dough directly onto the glowing clay walls, blistering in under sixty seconds.

Naan is a leavened flatbread made with a yeasted dough, which is what gives it that pillowy, slightly chewy texture with pockets of air. Ours is slapped onto the wall of the tandoor and baked at extreme heat for under a minute — you can see the char blisters where it touched the clay. That quick, high-heat bake is what naan actually is; nothing about it is deep-fried or pan-cooked. We serve it plain, or dressed up: garlic naan, onion naan, peshwari naan (stuffed sweet, with nuts and dried fruit), and our Rani Ki Special Naan. If you only order one bread on your first visit, naan is the classic choice — it's the bread most people picture when they think "Indian restaurant."

Chapathi (and roti)

Chapathi — often called roti elsewhere — is a thinner, unleavened whole-wheat flatbread, cooked on a flat griddle rather than in the tandoor. No yeast, no char, no pockets of air. It's lighter and a little more neutral in flavor than naan, which is exactly why it's the everyday bread in most Indian households — the kind you'd eat with dinner on a Tuesday, not necessarily the one you'd order to impress someone. If you're watching richness (naan's dough includes fat that chapathi's doesn't), chapathi is the better option.

Poori

We also serve poori, which is a different animal again — a small disc of unleavened dough that's deep-fried instead of baked or griddled, so it puffs up into a light, airy pocket. It's the bread you order for something a little more indulgent, closer to a treat than a staple.

Which bread goes with what

There's no strict rule, but a few pairings work especially well:

All of our breads are 100% vegetarian and baked to order inside our charcoal tandoor, making them the perfect pairing whether you're ordering slow-simmered vegetarian curries or 100% certified Halal chicken and lamb classics.

Explore all eight fresh-baked varieties on our dining menu, or order online for piping-hot pickup and delivery across Mamaroneck, Rye, Scarsdale, White Plains, and Greenwich.