Mylapore · Est. 1948 · Banana-leaf service

A hundred yearsof Tamil Nadu, on one leaf

Heirloom recipes from Chettinad to the Coromandel coast — slow-cooked over fire, served in brass, plated with the reverence a hundred-year kitchen earns.

Reserve a table See the menu
A banana-leaf spread of South Indian dishes laid out for service

The Sappadu — fourteen vessels, served in order

4.9 · 3,200+ guests
Our Story

It began with a grandmother's notebook

In 1948, Kamala Iyer cooked for the pilgrims arriving at the Kapaleeshwarar temple. Her measurements lived in the margins of a ledger — a fistful of this, a lime's worth of that. We still cook from it.

Nothing here is fusion. Nothing is simplified for the room. The luxury is in the patience: the overnight ferment, the hand-pounded podi, the decoction that waits.

1948

Year the first kitchen opened

4

Tamil regions on the menu

60+

Family recipes, unchanged

Spices being ground on a granite stone
A traditional South Indian thali served on a banana leaf
The Kitchen

Comfort the old way, kept on purpose

Four things we refuse to modernise away. Scroll through them — the way a meal unfolds, one course at a time.

01

Banana-Leaf Service

Every feast is laid on a fresh leaf and served vessel by vessel, in the order our grandmothers intended.

02

Heirloom Recipes

Sourced from four Tamil regions and cooked exactly as written in family notebooks, nothing modernised away.

03

Brass & Fire

Seasoned cast iron, granite ammikkal, and hand-beaten brass — the original tools, still doing the work.

04

Single-Origin Spice

Pepper from the Nilgiris, gingelly from Virudhunagar, jaggery pressed for us alone in Tirunelveli.

Meenakshi Iyer, head cook
Senthil Raghavan, co-founder
The Custodians

The people who keep the recipe honest

Meenakshi learned at her grandmother's elbow and has not let a podi be machine-ground since. Senthil runs the floor like a temple — every leaf placed the same way, every tumbler filled to the same line.

Meenakshi Iyer

Custodian & Head Cook

Senthil Raghavan

Co-founder & Floor

From Our Guests

What people carry home

5.0

“The rasam alone is worth the journey — it tastes the way Mylapore tasted forty years ago, before everyone forgot how.”

Lakshmi Narayanan

Food historian, Madras

Visit Us

Reserve your leaf

Seating is timed around the banana-leaf service. Tell us when you are coming and we will set the leaf.

table@chennaicuisines.in+91 44 4012 880012 Marina Heritage Walk, Mylapore, Chennai 600004
A large banana-leaf feast laid out for an event

A wedding sappadu, anywhere

Our cooks travel with their own brass and fire. Forty guests or four hundred, we lay the full feast on fresh leaves at your venue.

Plan a feast
Home delivery

The leaf, to your door

Need Help?

Questions, before you arrive