On Wednesday, September 30, Rasika Venkatesa brings puli inji, jaggery granita, and her grandmother's name to 129 Havemeyer Street, between South First and Grand Streets. Mythily Williamsburg restaurant is the standalone home for the Tamil and South Indian cooking Venkatesa began as a pop-up in 2024, then sharpened during a four-month residency at Fulgrances in Greenpoint, with business partners Varun Kandadi and Nicolas Chavotier.
The opening carries a clear maker's signature. Venkatesa is not using Mythily as a broad survey of Indian cooking. Her menu explores Tamil Nadu, the South Indian state tied to her own childhood and household, and she has placed that focus inside a Williamsburg dining room with 33 seats, a nine-seat bar, and a drinks program built around nonalcoholic and low-ABV options.
Mythily Williamsburg restaurant begins with a grandmother's name
Venkatesa grew up in a Tamil Brahmin household in Chennai, and she has been direct about the person who first fixed cooking in her life. Her grandmother, she said, was "a huge inspiration in my cooking career." Mythily carries that name into the restaurant, not as a decorative family reference, but as the first thing a guest learns before a plate reaches the table.
That matters because Venkatesa's opening is built from a personal boundary. She has said Mythily is "what Indian cuisine means to me as a South Indian, as a Tamil girl, as an immigrant, as someone who's queer in a community that predominantly hasn't been super queer supportive before." The sentence holds several lines at once: region, gender, migration, sexuality, and the pressure of cooking inside inherited expectations. The food has to carry that without flattening it.
Her partners are part of the structure around the work. Kandadi also worked with Venkatesa on the room's design, alongside Studio Purisic. Aishwarya Ramanchandran, a family friend, created an art piece of a grandmother feeding her granddaughter. The gesture is literal. The room tells you who fed the chef before the chef feeds you.
From the French Laundry bench to a Tamil pass
Before Top Chef season 21 put Venkatesa in front of a national television audience in 2024, she had already spent time on other people's stations. She worked as a commis at the French Laundry in Yountville, California, then cooked at Mourad, the now-closed Moroccan restaurant in San Francisco. Those names matter less as trophies than as evidence of the kind of bench she stood at: kitchens where repetition, hierarchy, and exacting plate work shape a cook before anyone asks what food they want to claim as their own.
what Indian cuisine means to me as a South Indian, as a Tamil girl, as an immigrant, as someone who's queer in a community that predominantly hasn't been super queer supportive before.1
Rasika Venkatesa, Chef
Venkatesa's move toward Mythily followed a staged progression. She launched the pop-up in 2024. Six months later, she took a four-month residency at Fulgrances in Greenpoint, a now-closed pop-up space that gave her a public testing ground in Brooklyn. In 2025, Time Out New York named her one of its Best Young Chefs. By the time Mythily Williamsburg restaurant opens on Havemeyer Street, the project has already passed through television, pop-up service, a residency, and the slower work of turning a temporary menu into a standing kitchen.
There is a useful discipline in that arc. A pop-up can survive on compression: a handful of dishes, a room already built, a short run with pressure concentrated into a few services. A restaurant changes the problem. Venkatesa now has to make Tamil Nadu cuisine hold over a week, a month, a season, with partners, payroll, a bar, a dining room, and guests who will return with memory. The pass becomes the test.
How Venkatesa puts Tamil Nadu on the plate
The opening menu is arranged in sections such as snacks, small, and big. One starter gives a close view of Venkatesa's method: scallop crudo with Concord grapes and puli inji, the tamarind, ginger, and green chile condiment, finished with a granita made from jaggery, ginger, and warming spices. The dish moves between raw seafood, fruit, acid, sugar, heat, and cold. It is not a generic crudo with a regional garnish. The condiment and the jaggery granita do the steering.
That plate gives early reservations one of the clearest reads on the Mythily kitchen. Scallop brings softness and salinity. Concord grapes add skin, juice, and a darker sweetness. Puli inji cuts with tamarind and ginger; the granita changes the temperature at the last moment. The craft is in how those elements land in the mouth together, not in a claim about fusion or reinvention.
Venkatesa's menu also returns to a dessert from her Fulgrances residency: rasmalai tres leches. She takes the Bengali sweet into sponge cake soaked in saffron-cardamom milk, then tops it with whipped white chocolate, toasted pistachios, almonds, and orange zest. It is a marker from the residency to the permanent restaurant. A dish survives the temporary room and earns its place in the next one.
For diners tracking the Mythily Williamsburg restaurant opening, these are the details that matter more than the novelty of an address. The menu gives Venkatesa room to work across memory, South Indian cooking, and the fine-dining stations where she trained. It also gives early guests a way to see which dishes she has carried forward from pop-up service and which ones now belong to the standing program.
Vegetables, main courses, and the work of rebuilding cabbage
Vegetables sit near the center of the menu, and the Caraflex cabbage entree shows how much labor Venkatesa is willing to put into a single head. She slow-roasts it with cumin, coriander, and turmeric, then peels it apart and rebuilds it with layers of sorrel-coconut chutney. The finished cabbage sits on green lentils and mushrooms, both roasted and pureed.
That process reads like station work: roast, peel, layer, rebuild, puree, plate. It also resists the easier path of treating vegetables as side dishes. The cabbage becomes an object of construction. Lentils and mushrooms do not sit underneath as garnish; they supply weight, earth, and the base note for the chutney's sorrel and coconut.
The big plates range from $30 to $50. Venkatesa lists chicken ballotine with onions and stir-fried lentils; tilefish with romanesco and black currant kosho; and short ribs with plums, maitake mushrooms, and bone marrow kozhumbu, a tamarind curry. The tilefish can be veganized with kabocha squash, which places the adaptation inside the dish rather than outside the menu as an afterthought.
The range also tells visitors what kind of opening this is. Mythily is not a tasting-counter project with a locked sequence. It is a nearly 40-seat restaurant with snacks, small plates, big plates, dessert, a bar, and enough pricing clarity for a guest to plan a first pass through the menu. The craft will be measured in how Venkatesa's kitchen repeats those dishes after the first week's attention fades.
A low-ABV bar program with schoolyard memory
The drinks menu emphasizes nonalcoholic and low-ABV options, using cordials and spice-infused shochus. The Kho Kho combines hibiscus-infused shochu with rosebud syrup and takes its name from a childhood game Venkatesa played at school. The Power Cut, a nonalcoholic drink, uses spiced black tea, fresh ginger juice, and jaggery, and refers to summer electricity blackouts in India.
Venkatesa described the Power Cut in direct physical terms: "It's like a slap in your face, but in a good way; you have a jolt." That is the best kind of beverage note because it gives the maker's intended sensation without leaning on ornament. Black tea, ginger juice, and jaggery are the working parts. The drink's memory has a voltage attached to it.
There will also be beers from Brooklyn breweries and global wines. Still, the emphasis on low-ABV and nonalcoholic drinking gives the bar its own station in the restaurant's method. A nonalcoholic drink can collapse into sweetness if the maker does not build acid, spice, bitterness, or heat into the glass. Venkatesa's listed ingredients point toward drinks that move with the food rather than sit beside it as substitutions.
The room at 129 Havemeyer Street and the next service to watch
Mythily opens near the crowded restaurant stretch around Grand Street, but the address is precise: 129 Havemeyer Street, between South First and Grand Streets. The 1,000-square-foot space holds 33 seats in the dining room and nine at the bar. Venkatesa and Kandadi worked with Studio Purisic on an interior of deep reds, dark greens, neutrals, wood, limewash, brass, Moroccan clay, and quartzite. Venkatesa wanted the color palette to evoke Kanchipuram saris.
The room's most direct image is Ramanchandran's piece of a grandmother feeding her granddaughter. It places lineage in the dining room before the first course. That image also gives the restaurant its emotional scale: not nostalgia as decoration, but the hand-to-mouth transfer that turns family practice into professional work.
Mythily will open Wednesday through Saturday from 5 to 10 p.m., and Sunday from 4 to 9 p.m. Reservations are available through SevenRooms. For cooks, diners, and anyone who follows a chef from pop-up to residency to permanent address, the next thing to watch is not the first night alone. Watch the second month, when Venkatesa's Tamil Nadu menu has to settle into rhythm, and the grandmother's name has to hold through repeated service.
