Cinnamon Group

The portfolio’s centre of gravity is Nadodi (நாடோடி, Tamil/Malayalam for “nomad”), which opened on Jalan Mayang in 2017 and relocated to Four Seasons Hotel KL in June 2023. Around it sit Aliyaa, the 2007 Plaza Damansara bungalow that started everything; Yarl (யாழ்ப்பாணம், Tamil shorthand for Yalpanam — Jaffna), the Northern Sri Lankan concept that began as a Brickfields stall in 2009; Nero Nero, the first non-Sri Lankan brandline; and a 2023 cohort of five new restaurants — Las Meninas, Brasa, Café Colombo, Isabelle, and Ver Bar — opened in a single year. Eighteen concepts in seventeen years, sixteen of them in Kuala Lumpur, one in Penang, two on Pulau Redang, and one in Putrajaya.

The structural argument the group makes is the operator’s wager: that authority in Malaysian premium dining can be built outside hotel-group hegemony, by a founder-led platform whose authenticity comes from charging what each cuisine deserves rather than what the market has trained itself to discount it to.

The 2017 gambit

In 2007, Aliyaa opened as Kuala Lumpur’s first major Sri Lankan restaurant — a category that did not exist in the city’s dining landscape and had to be invented. By 2009, Yarl had added a Northern Sri Lankan / Jaffna concept. By 2014, Hatch.kl had been spun up as an in-house creative agency to handle design and brand work for what was then a three-restaurant portfolio. By 2016, Nero Nero had opened at DC Mall — the first concept outside the Sri Lankan-Tamil register, and the announcement that Cinnamon Group would be a multi-cuisine platform rather than a single-format chain.

But the structural test came in 2017, with Nadodi.

Nadodi was not designed as a Sri Lankan or Tamil restaurant in the bungalow-comfort register that Aliyaa and Yarl had established. It was a progressive Tamil-Kerala-Sri Lankan tasting-menu room at RM 750++ MYR per cover — a price point that put it directly in conversation with the hotel-group fine-diners and the imported European chef-restaurants that dominated KL premium dining. The founding chefs were Johnson Ebenezer and Sricharan Venkatesh, both alumni of Gaggan in Bangkok — at that time one of the highest-ranked restaurants in Asia. The thesis was that a cuisine the Malaysian market had structurally discounted, served at the technical level Gaggan had set the bar for, would clear the same recognition thresholds.

The market told the founder he was out of his mind. He raised the prices anyway. “People told us we were out of our minds for thinking folks would pay top dollar for Indian fare,” Abbi Kanthasamy told The Peak Malaysia in February 2024. “We took that as a challenge, jacked up the prices, and poured in even better ingredients.” The same year, Kikubari — a French-Japanese concept — opened at DC Mall, adding a second high-margin format to the portfolio in twelve months.

By 2018, CNN International had called Nadodi “the world’s next great Indian restaurant.” KL Tatler had placed both Aliyaa and Nadodi in its Top 20. The 2017 wager had its first signals back from the market.

The 50 Best ascent

In 2021, Nadodi entered the Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants extended list at No. 99 — the group’s first international ranking, four years after the gambit. In 2022 it climbed to No. 62 — the highest placement Cinnamon Group has ever recorded, and a position that put a founder-owned independent KL restaurant inside the top half of Asia’s premium dining ladder. In 2023 it ranked No. 94. The MICHELIN Guide entered Malaysia for the first time in December 2022; in 2023 Nadodi was MICHELIN Selected and Aliyaa — the bungalow that started everything — received a Bib Gourmand. The 2024 MICHELIN edition retained both designations at their new locations.

Three years on Asia’s 50 Best is not a vanity metric. The 50 Best voting academies are deliberately structured to favour established hotel-group dining and chef-driven destinations with international press infrastructure. For a founder-owned independent operator from Kuala Lumpur — a market that had never previously placed a restaurant on the list — to register three consecutive years of recognition at a Tamil-Kerala-Sri Lankan tasting-menu room was the institutional payoff for a contrarian premium-pricing thesis the market had previously refused to underwrite.

The honest closing dynamic is that Nadodi did not appear on the Asia’s 50 Best 2024 or 2025 extended lists. Possible explanations include voting-academy turnover, the chef succession from Ebenezer / Venkatesh to current culinary leadership Yavhin Siriwardhana and Eliyaz, or the institutional lag that often accompanies a hotel-anchored relocation — none publicly confirmed. It is the post-validation question every independent operator faces once the first ranking arc closes: whether the platform can sustain the recognition through its own succession, or whether the original chef partnership was itself the load-bearing piece.

Eighteen concepts, no layoffs

The Movement Control Order of 18 March 2020 closed dine-in across Malaysia. By the time the MCO sequence ended in 2022, an estimated 25–30% of Malaysian restaurants had shut permanently — a figure published by The Star in October 2021 that captures one of the steepest restaurant-mortality events in modern Southeast Asian hospitality.

Nadodi and Kikubari went dark — both formats depended on the kind of long-form, high-cover-count fine-dining experience that no delivery channel could approximate. The rest of the portfolio pivoted through Hatch.kl, which had spent six years as the in-house creative agency and was now, abruptly, the in-house delivery and digital infrastructure for sixteen restaurants in lockdown.

Cinnamon Group did not lay off a single member of staff across all eighteen concepts. It also did not pause expansion. Frank’s Bar — a speakeasy cocktail bar — and Natalina — an Italian concept — both opened at Avenue K mid-lockdown in 2020, against operator orthodoxy that said the survival move was contraction. The decision was financially counter-intuitive on every dimension: revenue had collapsed across the most profitable formats, dine-in was prohibited by federal order, and the cash runway required to keep eighteen kitchens staffed and two new ones launched was the kind of commitment that investor-led operators are typically structured to refuse. A founder-owned platform could absorb it; a hotel-group F&B division would have been required to triage.

By 2023, the group was reporting record sales (Tatler Asia); by 2024, it had swept fifteen titles at the HAPA Malaysia Awards, the highest single-night haul of any operator. The HAPA Resilience Award — given specifically for COVID-era performance — sat alongside Restaurant of the Year, Best Chef, and Service Excellence trophies. The award sequence is the institutional payoff for the no-layoff decision four years earlier; the staff who were not let go in 2020 are the staff who carried the recognition home in 2024.

Five new concepts opened in 2023 alone: Las Meninas at TRX, Brasa at Bukit Damansara, Café Colombo and Isabelle at IOI City Mall in Putrajaya, and Ver Bar attached to Nadodi’s new Four Seasons home. Feliz followed at Avenue K in January 2024. The post-pandemic land-grab was as concentrated as anything in the group’s seventeen-year history — five concepts in twelve months, into a Klang Valley that delivers 59.75% of Malaysia’s foodservice market value (Mordor Intelligence).

What MICHELIN saw, three years late

The 2023 Nadodi relocation to Four Seasons Hotel KL is the structural inversion that closes the arc.

Hotel-anchored fine dining in KL had spent two decades operating on a single axis — the property opens, the chef is recruited, the concept is built around the venue, and the recognition flows to the hotel’s F&B platform. Nadodi reversed it. The restaurant arrived at Four Seasons with six years of independent operation, three Asia’s 50 Best placements, and an established culinary identity that the property had not built. The hotel joined the brand, not the other way round. Ver Bar, the cocktail bar that opened in the same Four Seasons footprint in June 2023, is part of the same arrangement — a Cinnamon Group brand placed inside a five-star hotel under the operator’s own creative direction.

MICHELIN entered Malaysia in December 2022 and recognised the eighteen-concept portfolio twice in its first edition: Nadodi as Selected, Aliyaa as Bib Gourmand. The 2024 edition retained both. The recognition came three years after the 50 Best ascent began — late enough that the institutional validation did not lead the market thesis, but rather followed it. The MICHELIN inspectors saw what the market had told the operator was impossible in 2017, and what the 50 Best academies had been recording since 2021.

The portfolio shape

Cinnamon Group does not run a franchisable single format. It runs distinct ethnic and regional concepts at distinct price points — Bib Gourmand at Aliyaa (RM 60–100 per cover), the original Yarl Brickfields outlet at the modest end of premium, Italian at Nero Nero and Natalina, Spanish at Bocado and Las Meninas, French-Japanese at Kikubari (currently temporarily closed), resort dining at The Cove and Acqua at The Taaras on Pulau Redang, speakeasy cocktails at Frank’s Bar and Ver Bar, and Tamil-Kerala-Sri Lankan tasting-menu fine dining at Nadodi at the top.

The strategic logic is cuisine-as-hedge across price points. Bib Gourmand foot traffic is uncorrelated with tasting-menu cycles; resort dining is uncorrelated with mall retail; the Italian and Spanish brandlines hedge the group’s Sri Lankan-Tamil identity against the risk of cuisine-cycle exhaustion. Eighteen distinct concepts, supported by a single creative agency (Hatch.kl), a single procurement infrastructure, and a single founder. The portfolio shape is the answer to the question of how an independent founder-led platform competes structurally with hotel-group hegemony — not by matching capital, but by building cuisine breadth that no single hotel F&B platform attempts.

The Cinnamon Group story is the institutional version of a thesis Kuala Lumpur premium dining did not previously contain. That a founder-led portfolio could reach the same recognition tiers as the hotel groups, by charging cuisines what they deserve and refusing to discount on the way up. International reach has begun to compound on the back of the recognition: Nadodi has run pop-ups at Banyan Tree Bangkok in 2020 and 2022, at Cinnamon Grand Colombo in 2024, and at the Singapore F1 Paddock Club — the first export motions for a brand that, until 2017, had been told its core proposition could not even clear the home market. The 2024–25 absence from Asia’s 50 Best is the open question. The eighteen concepts, the 2023 Four Seasons graduation, the no-layoff record, and the 15-award HAPA night are the answer the group has on the board.

Last updated: April 30, 2026