Over 50 years ago Anjappar began as a local Chettinad restaurant in the Chennai area, currently they operate in 70 locations in both Indian and several countries around the world. Anjappar offers a well-rounded South Indian menu with special focus on the Chettinad style preparations.
Chettinad is a cluster of villages in the southern part of Tamil Nadu, India, and home to the Nattukottai Chettiars, a prosperous banking and business community. Chettinad is renowned for its cuisine, architecture, and temples. The 19th-century Chettinad mansions as depicted in the picture above are renowned for their wide courtyards and spacious rooms embellished with marble imported from Italy, chandeliers and teak from Burma, crockery from Indonesia, crystals from Europe and wall-to-wall mirrors from Belgium.
The cuisine is uncommonly subtle and aromatic, a heritage of Chettiar participation in the centuries-old spice trade, the global import and export of pungent seeds, fruits and barks from places like Cochin and Penang, the Banda Islands, Arab ports in the Straits of Hormuz. The cuisine is based on staples of south Indian cooking like coconut, rice and legumes but get an internationalized flavor with the addition of Tellicherry pepper, Ceylon cardamom, Indonesian nutmeg, Madagascar cloves and blue ginger, or galangal, from Laos and Vietnam. Traditional Chettinad offerings have been highlighted in this menu for you to enjoy. Bon Appetit.
