Setting the table…
எங்கள் கதை
A lotus, a tawa and eight tables
Thamarai Kitchen has cooked in Mylapore since 2017. This is what we believe about food, and why the room looks the way it does.
A kitchen that started at a breakfast table
Thamarai Kitchen opened in Mylapore in 2017 with eight tables and one tawa. The founders, Lakshmi and Senthil Rajan, had cooked for their extended family every Sunday for twenty years and wanted a room where strangers could eat the same way — slowly, generously, with their hands if they liked.
The name is the Tamil word for lotus: a flower that grows from the mud of a tank and opens in the morning. It is the flower of the Mylapore temple tank two streets from our door, and a reminder that the plainest beginnings can produce something clear and beautiful.
Tradition is a method, not a museum
We ferment our batter for eighteen hours in clay pots because it tastes better, not because it is old-fashioned. We grind masalas every morning for the same reason. Where a modern technique produces a better plate — a precise oven for the Mysore pak, a chilled room for the elaneer payasam — we use it without apology.
The food is not reinvented. The service, the room and the pace are what we have made contemporary.
Ingredients with a postcode
Our rice is seeraga samba and ponni from the Cauvery delta. The coffee is a peaberry blend from the Nilgiris, roasted weekly. Pepper comes from Tellicherry, jaggery from Kolhapur, seer fish from the Kasimedu market before six each morning.
We print the week's sourcing on the specials board, and we change the menu when the season changes rather than importing around it.
Hospitality is the main course
A meal here is served the way it would be at home: someone comes back to the table, more than once, and asks if you would like more. Rice is unlimited. Children are welcome and get their own small steel plates. Nobody is handed a bill before they ask for it.
பொருட்கள்
What we will not compromise on
Four rules written on the kitchen wall in 2017. Still there.
- Seasonal, not year-round
- Mangoes in May, elaneer in the heat, nellikai after the rains. The menu moves with the market.
- Ground every morning
- Sambar powder, podi and every roast masala are ground before the first dosa goes down.
- Cold-pressed oils
- Sesame and coconut oil, pressed by a chekku mill in Kanchipuram.
- No shortcuts in the batter
- Eighteen hours of fermentation in clay, every day of the year, even in the monsoon.
“Someone will come back to the table and ask if you would like more. The answer is usually yes.”
Lakshmi Rajan, co-founder
Come and taste the story.
Sunday breakfast is where it started. It is still the best time to visit.