In the Garment District, chef Regi Mathew is introducing New Yorkers to a deeply regional side of Indian food—one shaped by Kerala’s neighborhood toddy shops, home cooking and the pleasure of eating together.
New York has never needed an invitation to eat around the world. The city’s appetite is as expansive as its population, and its restaurant scene has long offered a passport to places many diners may never have visited.
But there is a difference between serving food from a country and introducing people to the traditions that give that food its meaning.
At Chatti, a contemporary Kerala restaurant and bar on West 37th Street, chef Regi Mathew is making that distinction the point.
The restaurant takes its inspiration from Kerala’s traditional toddy shops: neighborhood gathering places associated with kallu, a mildly alcoholic drink made from fermented palm sap, and a style of cooking that has developed its own regional identity. These establishments are not simply places to drink. They are part of a social food culture, where people gather over generous plates, conversation and dishes that are often difficult to encounter outside the region.
Chatti is an attempt to bring that world to New York.
And it begins with a name.
A chatti is a traditional clay pot found in Kerala homes and kitchens. It is an everyday object, but also a fitting symbol for a restaurant interested in carrying culinary memory into a new setting. The idea is not to turn regional food into a museum exhibit. It is to let the food speak in a city that is constantly negotiating the relationship between heritage and reinvention.
Beyond the familiar Indian menu
For many American diners, the phrase Indian food brings a relatively narrow set of dishes to mind. That familiarity can be comforting, but it can also obscure the extraordinary range of regional cuisines across the subcontinent.
Kerala offers a different introduction.
Located along India’s southwestern coast, the state has a culinary identity shaped by its coastline, tropical landscape, agriculture and long history of trade. Coconut, seafood, rice, spices and distinctive breads all have important places in its cooking. Yet even within Kerala, food is not one uniform tradition. Local ingredients, communities and cooking practices create regional differences that deserve to be understood on their own terms.
That is the territory Chatti wants to explore.
The restaurant’s menu draws from toddy-shop cooking and includes dishes such as seafood preparations, spiced meats, curries and Kerala breads. Among the dishes highlighted in coverage of the restaurant are Wayanad Chicken Curry, Ramapuram Chicken Curry, Chicken Stew and indigenous red rice. The menu is a reminder that Indian cuisine cannot be reduced to a single flavor profile—or a single idea of what a meal should look like.
There is also a social vocabulary to the experience. Chatti uses the word touchings for the small dishes traditionally eaten by hand alongside a drink. The term points to something important: food is not always organized around the formal sequence of a starter, entrée and dessert. Sometimes the pleasure is in the gathering, the variety on the table and the freedom to reach for another bite.
That is a welcome proposition in a city where dining can sometimes feel like a performance.
A chef’s research, not a shortcut
Mathew’s approach is rooted in documentation. Chatti says the chef spent more than three years researching Kerala’s food traditions, visiting 70 toddy shops and 265 homes, and recording more than 800 recipes. The restaurant describes that work as an effort to preserve recipes and regional knowledge that might otherwise remain undocumented.
The scale of that research matters because culinary traditions are not preserved by ingredients alone. They are carried by the people who cook, the families who teach, the communities that gather and the details that rarely make it into a standard restaurant menu.
A recipe can be written down. The knowledge of when a spice is ready, how a sauce should feel, or which preparation belongs to a particular place is harder to capture.
Mathew is not approaching New York as a blank canvas on which to invent a new version of Kerala food. He is bringing a body of research and experience to a dining room designed to make that food accessible to people encountering it for the first time.
That does not mean every dish will be familiar to every diner from Kerala, or that one restaurant can represent an entire state. No single table can do that. But a restaurant can create an opening: a chance to taste something beyond the expected and ask better questions about where it comes from.
The New York setting
Chatti opened in Manhattan in February 2025, bringing Mathew’s international venture to the Garment District, a neighborhood better known for offices, showrooms and its proximity to the city’s busiest corridors than for Kerala’s culinary traditions.
The address—252 West 37th Street—places the restaurant within reach of commuters, visitors, theatergoers and people moving between Midtown and the rest of the city. Its contemporary restaurant-and-bar format gives the cuisine a setting that is distinctly New York, even as the cooking looks toward southern India.
That balance is worth watching.
When a regional cuisine travels, it inevitably enters a conversation about authenticity, adaptation and audience. What should remain unchanged? What can be explained? What needs to be tasted before it can be understood? And how can a restaurant introduce unfamiliar food without sanding away the very details that make it distinctive?
Chatti’s answer appears to be rooted in the tradition itself: present the food, explain the culture around it and invite people to share the table.
That is a more interesting proposition than simply adding another cuisine to a city’s already crowded list.
Come curious
A first visit to Chatti can be approached as a small culinary lesson. Ask about the regional origins of a dish. Find out what the restaurant means by toddy-shop cuisine. Explore the breads and seafood preparations. If a menu description introduces an unfamiliar ingredient or technique, let that be the beginning of the conversation.
The point is not to arrive knowing everything. The point is to leave knowing something you did not know before.
New York’s greatest food experiences often do exactly that. They make the city feel larger, not because they are extravagant, but because they reveal how much history and cultural knowledge can fit into an ordinary meal.
At Chatti, a clay pot becomes a symbol of that exchange. Kerala’s neighborhood food culture finds a new address in Manhattan. And the table becomes a place where a regional tradition can be experienced, questioned and appreciated—one dish at a time.
Visit Chatti
Chatti by Chef Regi Mathew
252 West 37th Street, New York, NY 10018
Website: chattinewyork.com
Reservations: Visit the official website
Instagram: @chattinewyork
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