Why you should experience Nandhini Kiyosumi-Shirakawa in Tokyo, Japan.
Nandhini Kiyosumi-Shirakawa is a spirited South Indian restaurant where Miyoshi's creative character, regional cooking, layered spice and a remarkable chef collective bring the foodways of southern India into eastern Tokyo.
Set along Mitsume-dori near Kiyosubashi-dori and just steps from Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, the restaurant anchors its compact dining room with the vivid steel thalis, dosas and bowls that accompany a kitchen built across multiple South Indian regions. Lunch gathers curries, rice, breads and accompaniments into tightly composed sets before the broader dinner repertoire reveals the scale of cooking mastered by the team. A meal can move from fermented batter and coconut into tamarind, lentils, vegetables and spice-laden rice, allowing contrasting textures and acidity to accumulate across the table. The result is a Miyoshi restaurant whose apparent simplicity opens onto the exceptional shared history of the chefs who created Nandhini.
What you should know about Nandhini Kiyosumi-Shirakawa.
Nandhini Kiyosumi-Shirakawa is best known for opening on February 9, 2015 as the first Nandhini, created by South Indian cooks whose professional bond began years earlier as young apprentices in Bengaluru. Their training started around age twelve with dishwashing during shifts stretching from morning into late evening, then progressed through table cleaning, service, pot washing, vegetable cutting and spice preparation before advancement to second-chef positions and full professional cooking. Eight members of that formative group later reunited in Japan to build Nandhini, carrying a decade of shared apprenticeship into their own restaurant. Christaiah Ramanaiah, born in Andhra Pradesh, entered restaurant work after school and continued his training at prominent Bengaluru restaurants before arriving in Japan in 2005. He subsequently became head chef at a Tokyo South Indian restaurant and led its kitchen during a 2009-2014 period when the restaurant reached first place in Tabelog's Indian-food category. Nandhini's Kiyosumi-Shirakawa opening gave that accumulated professional history an independent home in 2015, and Ramanaiah founded SRIRAM in September 2016 before opening the second Nandhini in Toranomon in April 2017. SRIRAM brought the Kiyosumi-Shirakawa restaurant under its operation in November 2018, formally joining the original restaurant with the company controlling the growing Nandhini project. Recognition followed through Tabelog's Curry Tokyo 100 in 2017 and Asian/Ethnic Tokyo 100 selections in 2022 and 2023, carrying the restaurant founded by eight Bengaluru-trained colleagues into Tokyo's recognized South Indian dining circuit.
A vegetarian meals platter turns that collective training into a sequence built for mixing, beginning with rice surrounded by preparations whose acidity, spice and texture change as they meet. Sambar supplies lentil depth before rasam drives tamarind-led sharpness through the rice, while bean and carrot poriyal bring vegetables into contact with coconut and tempered spices. Dal palak adds softer pulses and greens before olan moves toward a gentler coconut-rich preparation, allowing the plate to shift intensity. Puri and parotta introduce two distinct bread textures, one puffed through frying and the other layered, while papad adds brittle crunch between spoonfuls of the wetter preparations. Semolina payasam closes with sweetness and a softer consistency after the accumulating chile, sourness and toasted spice of the preceding dishes. Nandhini Kiyosumi-Shirakawa makes recombination central to the meal, allowing individual preparations to acquire new character as rice, lentils, vegetables, coconut, tamarind and breads meet across the thali.
How to fold Nandhini Kiyosumi-Shirakawa into your trip.
Nandhini Kiyosumi-Shirakawa works as the lunch anchor for an afternoon moving through immersive Edo history, Meiji-era garden patronage and contemporary art across the cultural institutions surrounding Kiyosumi-Shirakawa.
Begin at Fukagawa Edo Museum, opened in November 1986 with a full-scale reconstruction of Fukagawa Saga-cho during the Tenpo era, using sound and changing illumination around shops, tenements and household objects to recreate the rhythms of a nineteenth-century riverside community. Continue to Kiyosumi Gardens, where Mitsubishi founder Yataro Iwasaki acquired the former daimyo property in 1878, opened Fukagawa Shinbokuen in 1880 and assembled celebrated stones from across Japan before the Iwasaki family donated much of the earthquake-damaged grounds to Tokyo for public preservation. Conclude at Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, bringing the route back toward Miyoshi for an encounter with the postwar and contemporary art institution that gives this side of Kiyosumi-Shirakawa a major cultural destination beside Nandhini. The progression moves from reconstructed Edo domestic culture through Iwasaki-era garden making into contemporary artistic practice, revealing three distinct periods of Tokyo cultural life within the district surrounding the restaurant.
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