The name on the door is her grandmother’s.

On Wednesday, chef Rasika Venkatesa opens Mythily at 129 Havemeyer St. in Williamsburg, the first permanent home for a project she has been carrying through pop-ups, collaborative dinners and a four-month Greenpoint residency. The restaurant is named for Mythily Ramachandran, Venkatesa’s grandmother in Chennai, who taught her a style of cooking that was less a philosophy than a daily habit: use what is nearby, use what is in season and waste very little.

That inheritance now sits inside a roughly 1,000-square-foot Brooklyn restaurant with 33 dining-room seats and nine at the bar. The room is deep red, green and neutral, with wood, limewash, brass and stone. Venkatesa and business partner Varun Kandadi worked with Studio Purisic on the design, drawing some of its palette from the silk saris made in Kanchipuram, the temple city in Tamil Nadu. A piece by family friend Aishwarya Ramachandran shows a grandmother feeding her granddaughter.

It is an unusually literal piece of restaurant symbolism. Mythily is a restaurant about lineage, but Venkatesa is not trying to reproduce her grandmother’s kitchen in amber. She is trying to work out what that kitchen means after culinary school, California fine dining, television, New York and years spent cooking away from home.

The result is a menu rooted in Tamil Nadu but written by a chef who has moved through some very different rooms.

From Chennai to California

Venkatesa grew up in Chennai and studied hotel management at Manipal University before leaving India to work in professional kitchens abroad. Early stops included Alexander’s Steakhouse in San Francisco and Hugos in Sydney. She later took a commis position at Thomas Keller’s The French Laundry in Yountville, California, eventually working her way up to chef de partie.

In late 2019, she joined Mourad Lahlou’s Michelin-starred San Francisco restaurant Mourad. She started on the fish station and rose to chef de cuisine. StarChefs named her a Rising Star in 2022. During the pandemic, she also helped the restaurant produce hundreds of meals a day for charitable distribution.

The résumé is the sort that can produce a technically formidable young chef and, sometimes, a certain professional placelessness. Venkatesa seems to have responded by going in the opposite direction. The longer she cooked other people’s food, the more specifically she began thinking about her own.

She traveled through Tamil Nadu to cook with local communities and study regional foodways. Her own account of the trip describes it as part of the work of figuring out what came next. The cooking that emerged from it is South Indian, but even that description is broader than the restaurant intends to be. Mythily is concerned with Tamil food and, more narrowly still, with Venkatesa’s experience of it.

That distinction matters in New York, where the phrase “Indian restaurant” has historically asked a continent’s worth of food to fit beneath a single awning. The city has begun to make more room for regional specificity. Semma, Vijay Kumar’s Greenwich Village restaurant, has put rural Tamil Nadu cooking into a Michelin-starred dining room. Venkatesa enters that conversation from a different angle: autobiographical, restless and filtered through the grammar of contemporary American fine dining.

The long pop-up

Mythily began as a pop-up in 2024. Venkatesa used it to try several forms of South Indian cooking, from communal banana-leaf meals to tasting menus built around seasonal produce. She cooked with fellow Top Chef contestants and at events including the James Beard Foundation’s Platform series. Six months after starting the pop-up, she moved into Fulgurances Laundromat in Greenpoint for a four-month residency.

The residency became a kind of rehearsal room. Venkatesa served six- and eight-course tasting menus and changed them every two weeks, testing how dishes behaved when Mythily stopped being an occasional event and had to function like a restaurant. By then, she had also appeared on Season 21 of Bravo’s Top Chef, where she was introduced to a much larger audience as a chef from Chennai living in New York.

What she kept returning to was her grandmother. In an essay published this summer, Venkatesa described Mythily Ramachandran as her first teacher in cooking locally, years before “farm-to-table” became restaurant language. The lesson was practical rather than fashionable. Ingredients had seasons and places. Cooking began with what was actually there.

That idea has followed Venkatesa into Brooklyn. The permanent Mythily does not read like a collection of family recipes transferred intact from Chennai. The family history is present, but so are Concord grapes, black currants, maitake mushrooms and the habits of a chef trained to construct a composed plate.

A Tamil menu in Brooklyn

One of the clearest examples is the scallop crudo, which Venkatesa pairs with Concord grapes and puli inji, the sweet-hot Tamil condiment made with ginger, tamarind and chile. A granita of jaggery and ginger brings cold and sweetness to the plate. It is recognizably the work of a fine-dining kitchen, but the flavor reference point is elsewhere.

Vegetables are not treated as supporting material. A Caraflex cabbage is slowly roasted with cumin, coriander and turmeric, then served with sorrel-coconut chutney, green lentils and mushrooms. Green apple and fennel appear with rasam broth. A stuffed eggplant dish, kathrikkai adaippu curry, comes directly out of Venkatesa’s memories of her grandmother’s cooking.

The larger plates move further from literal reproduction. Tilefish is served with romanesco and a black-currant kosho. Chicken ballotine is paired with lentils and onions. Short ribs arrive with plums, maitake mushrooms and bone-marrow kozhumbu, using the deep tamarind-rich structure of a Tamil curry as a setting for a very New York restaurant ingredient.

Venkatesa has described Mythily as an expression of what Indian food means to her “as a South Indian, as a Tamil girl, as an immigrant,” telling Eater that she wanted the restaurant to come from a personal place rather than represent Indian cuisine in the abstract.

That may be the most useful way to understand the menu. It does not make a claim to completeness. In fact, it depends on incompleteness. It is one cook’s map of a very large place.

Childhood, translated

The drinks and desserts make the autobiographical impulse even more explicit. Kho Kho, made with hibiscus-infused shochu and rosebud syrup, is named for the schoolyard game Venkatesa played as a child. Power Cut, a nonalcoholic drink of black tea, fresh ginger and jaggery, takes its name from the summer electricity outages she remembers in India.

Rasmalai becomes tres leches: sponge cake soaked in saffron-cardamom milk, finished with white chocolate, pistachios, almonds and orange zest. It is a dish Venkatesa served during the Fulgurances residency and has carried into the permanent restaurant. South Indian filter coffee becomes soft serve with peanut-jaggery brittle.

There is an obvious risk in this sort of cooking. Memory can become branding very quickly in New York restaurants. A childhood sweet, a grandmother’s recipe, a school game and an old family photograph can be turned into a tidy origin story long before anyone tastes the food.

Venkatesa’s career makes the story more complicated. She did not move directly from a family kitchen to a dining room bearing her grandmother’s name. She went away. She learned another culinary language. She cooked French food in Napa, Moroccan food in San Francisco, appeared on American television and then returned to Tamil Nadu to study the thing she had left. Mythily comes out of that distance.

That is why the grandmother’s name feels less like nostalgia than a declaration of method. The point is not that the food is old. Much of it plainly is not. The point is that Venkatesa has chosen where to begin.

Mythily opens Sept. 30 at 129 Havemeyer St., between South First and Grand streets, in Williamsburg. It is open Wednesday through Saturday from 5 to 10 p.m. and Sunday from 4 to 9 p.m. Reservations are available through the restaurant’s website.

Mythily, 129 Havemeyer St., Williamsburg, Brooklyn.