Williamsburg Is Getting a Tamil Kitchen Named for a Grandmother

Rasika Venkatesa is most excited about a scallop crudo with Concord grapes, puli inji, the ginger-tamarind-chile pickle, and a granita of jaggery, ginger, and warming spice. Mythily, her first restaurant, opens Wednesday, September 30, at 129 Havemeyer Street in Williamsburg. The name is her grandmother’s.

Mythily Ramachandran taught her to cook in a Tamil Brahmin kitchen in Chennai with what was good, near, and in season. Venkatesa is opening the nearly 40-seat room with business partners Varun Kandadi and Nicolas Chavotier after two years of pop-ups. This is reported opening coverage, not a review.

From Yountville to Havemeyer

She studied hotel management at Manipal University, interned in Sydney, then took a commis job at The French Laundry, Thomas Keller’s three-star restaurant in Yountville, California. She moved up to chef de partie there, then became chef de cuisine at Mourad, Mourad Lahlou’s now-closed Moroccan restaurant in San Francisco, in 2022. That same year StarChefs named her a Rising Star in San Francisco and Oakland. She competed on Top Chef Season 21, filmed in Wisconsin in 2024, and cooked South Indian food through the run. She has said the restaurant is what Indian food means to her as a queer Tamil immigrant.

The pop-up named Mythily started in 2024. Six months later she took a four-month residency at Fulgurances Laundromat, the Greenpoint space that hosted rotating chefs and has since closed. Time Out New York put her on its Best Young Chefs list in 2025. A community Kickstarter for the build-out hit its goal in under two days. She has also traveled Tamil Nadu to cook with local kitchens before locking the Brooklyn card.

Tamil cooking, Brooklyn produce

The menu is snacks, small plates, and big plates, with mains in the $30 to $50 range. Vegetables sit in the middle of the card. A pointed green cabbage is slow-roasted with cumin, coriander, and turmeric, then rebuilt with sorrel-coconut chutney over green lentils and mushrooms. Short ribs come with plums, maitake mushrooms, and a bone-marrow kozhumbu, the Tamil tamarind curry. Tilefish is plated with romanesco and a black-currant kosho, a chile paste in the yuzu-kosho family. The kitchen can make that plate vegan with kabocha squash.

Dessert brings back a rasmalai tres leches from the Greenpoint residency: saffron-cardamom milk on sponge, white chocolate, pistachio, almond, orange zest. Filter coffee, the South Indian decoction brew, shows up as soft serve with peanut-jaggery brittle. Drinks lean low-alcohol and no-alcohol. Kho Kho is hibiscus shochu and rosebud syrup, named for a schoolyard tag game. Power Cut is black tea, ginger, and jaggery, named for the summer blackouts meant to save electricity.

New York already has a Tamil fine-dining room. Semma, chef Vijay Kumar’s Greenwich Village restaurant for Unapologetic Foods, holds a Michelin star for Tamil Nadu cooking. Mythily is Venkatesa’s own card in Brooklyn, closer to the Grand Street restaurant strip, with her grandmother’s name on the door.

A small red-and-green room

The space is about 1,000 square feet: 33 seats in the dining room and nine at the bar. Venkatesa and Kandadi designed it with Studio Purisic, the hospitality interiors studio. She wanted the reds and greens of Kanchipuram silk, the temple-town sari cloth. A family friend, Aishwarya Ramanchandran, made a piece of a grandmother feeding her granddaughter. Hours are Wednesday through Saturday, 5 to 10 p.m., and Sunday, 4 to 9 p.m. Book on SevenRooms.

If you want a table in the first weeks, book soon. Start with the puli inji scallop. The room is small.

Further reading

• Tamil Nadu: Rice Meals, Dryland Grains, and Coastal Tables
• Why North Indian Food Still Owns Most American Menus
• How Indian Food in America Got Michelin Stars So Fast
• A Kerala Chef Just Made Flatiron One of Manhattan’s Hardest Tables
• Aarthi Sampath’s Drāvida Is Building Indian Food Around Diaspora, Not Borders
• Goldsea: Asian chefs and New York’s Michelin list