Abbi Kanthasamy

There are two types of people in the world. Those who are humble, and those who are about to be. When you get arrogant and think you know everything, that's the day you go in the opposite direction.

The plan was engineering. McGill, the late nineteen-nineties, an undergraduate degree in a discipline that promised certainty and salary curves. The apprenticeship that mattered, however, happened on the dining-room floors of a Greek joint in Toronto where he bussed tables to pay the rent. He did not know it then, but the credential that arrived at graduation was the wrong one — or rather, the right one for a different career, the one he would not pursue.

A Sri Lankan Tamil born in Colombo and raised in Jaffna through the civil-war years, schooled at Jaffna Hindu College before the family migrated to Palo Alto in 1985 — first job: stacking sandwiches at a Subway — and then through Gunn High School and West Hill Collegiate Institute in Toronto. Three continents and one conventional career-track away from restaurants, he arrived in Kuala Lumpur in 1998 on a Bay Area furniture distributor’s quality-control assignment during the Asian financial crisis. He was in his late twenties. The trip was supposed to last weeks. It became the rest of the life.

The dinner that became Aliyaa #

The origin moment of Cinnamon Group is small, domestic, and unrepeatable. In 2007, in his Plaza Damansara apartment, he cooked a Sri Lankan dinner for friends. The recipes belonged to his mother — Dr Parvathy Kanthasamy, a culinary practitioner from Jaffna who had spent a working life refining the spice mixes and curry techniques of northern Sri Lanka. The food was served by a Sri Lankan helper his mother had trained. The kitchen, in effect, was hers — relayed through her son’s apartment, in a city six thousand kilometres from where she had assembled it.

A friend at the table asked the question that became the company. Why can’t I get this anywhere in Kuala Lumpur? Sri Lankan food, in the volume and seriousness the dinner had displayed it, did not exist as a restaurant category in the city. Hotel buffets did Indian fusion. Brickfields did Tamil canteen cooking. Nobody was running a full-format Sri Lankan restaurant.

The answer was Aliyaa, opened weeks later in a bungalow on Plaza Damansara — Kuala Lumpur’s first major Sri Lankan restaurant. Spices imported from Sri Lanka. Recipes drawn from his mother. Kitchen anchored by the helper she had trained. Dr Parvathy Kanthasamy became, and remains, the brand’s spiritual culinary advisor; the helper became the first sous-chef. The first restaurant of an eighteen-concept group was, in the most literal sense, his mother’s kitchen with a dining room attached.

The consultants who looked at the numbers said it would not work. Plaza Damansara was a residential pocket. Sri Lankan cuisine had no obvious market. Restaurants were a margin-thin business and an engineer with no operating experience was not the founder anyone underwrote. He opened it anyway.

Two cities, two industries #

What followed in the next decade was less a restaurant career than a parallel-business pattern. Yarl — Tamil shorthand for Yalpanam (யாழ்ப்பாணம், Jaffna) — opened in Brickfields in 2009 as a humble stall serving northern Sri Lankan food. Sticky Wicket, a cricket-themed pub, in 2010. Nero Nero, the first non-Sri Lankan brandline, in 2016. The portfolio grew one concept at a time, and the engineer who had not planned to be a restaurateur now ran an operation that resembled a small group rather than a single restaurant.

In 2014 the parallel-business pattern took its defining shape. Hatch.kl was founded in Kuala Lumpur as a captive creative agency servicing three Cinnamon Group restaurants — branding, interiors, photography, the design backbone behind every concept launch. The same year, in Toronto, he launched Domus Vita Design, a furniture business operating in the city he had passed through on the way out of school. Two cities, two industries, one founder running both. The pattern was not a strategy. It was the founder’s working temperament made operational.

The decade also produced No Boundaries: Beyond Race, Religion, and Colour, a coffee-table photography book published in 2017 documenting Sri Lankan street-cricket children. It is not a restaurant project. It sits alongside the restaurants as the cultural undertow — the diaspora kid’s affirmation that the place he came from is worth photographing as much as cooking.

“Out of our minds” #

The contrarian bet that defines the founder profile arrived in 2017. Nadodi — Tamil and Malayalam for nomad (நாடோடி) — opened on Jalan Mayang as a progressive Tamil-Kerala-Sri Lankan tasting-menu restaurant, with chefs Johnson Ebenezer and Sricharan Venkatesh, both Gaggan alumni out of Bangkok. The format was uncompromising: a ten-course tasting menu, ingredients flown in from across South Asia, premium pricing aimed at a market the consultants insisted did not exist.

“People told us we were out of our minds for thinking folks would pay top dollar for Indian fare. We took that as a challenge, jacked up the prices, and poured in even better ingredients.”

That is from a 2024 interview in The Peak Malaysia. The arithmetic of the 2017 decision was thin and the market evidence ran the other way. Indian cuisine in Kuala Lumpur — and across the South Asian diaspora more generally — had been priced as canteen food for so long that the proposition of a tasting-menu room charging seven hundred ringgit and up sounded, to most of the people he asked, like a small-scale exercise in delusion.

He did not soften the format. He raised the prices and upgraded the sourcing. The same year, Kikubari, a French-Japanese concept, opened at DC Mall — the second high-margin tasting format the portfolio added in twelve months. The bet was placed in stereo.

The no-layoff decision #

In March 2020, eighteen concepts and several hundred employees deep, the Movement Control Order suspended dine-in across Malaysia overnight. Nadodi and Kikubari went dark. The rest of the portfolio pivoted to delivery via Hatch.kl. An estimated one in three Malaysian restaurants closed permanently across the next two years.

Investors and his own discipline pointed to the same playbook. Cut staff. Cut overhead. Cut concepts. He did the second and the third — slowly, where he had to — and refused the first.

“Invest in your people and you can never go wrong.”

That, from Tatler Asia, is the line that earned the HAPA Resilience Award four years before the award arrived. He did not frame it institutionally at the time. He framed it as a moral choice — the people who had built the kitchens were not, in his accounting, line items to be sacrificed to operating margin. Two new concepts opened mid-pandemic: Frank’s Bar, a speakeasy at Avenue K, and Natalina, an Italian. Both, against the grain of every operator instinct in the market, against the discipline he applied to his own books, opened in 2020. The no-layoff decision was the founder’s most expensive moral gesture and his most consequential strategic one. It cost him short-term margin. It produced the institutional core that survived.

Six years from contrarian to MICHELIN #

The 2017 Nadodi bet had its first piece of external proof in 2018, when CNN International called the restaurant “the world’s next great Indian restaurant.” It had its second in 2021, when Nadodi entered Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants extended list at No. 99. It climbed to No. 62 in 2022 — the highest placement any Cinnamon concept has reached.

In June 2023, Nadodi relocated to Four Seasons Hotel KL — the graduation from independent neighbourhood spot to hotel-anchored fine-diner, on the operator’s own terms rather than a hotel group’s. That December, the inaugural MICHELIN Guide for Malaysia named Nadodi Selected. Aliyaa — the bungalow restaurant that had started everything sixteen years earlier — took a Bib Gourmand. By the end of 2023, the founder who had been told in 2017 that he was out of his mind walked into a Four Seasons that now housed his flagship.

The HAPA Malaysia Awards 2023–24 cycle confirmed it institutionally. Cinnamon Group swept fifteen titles in a single night — the highest haul of any operator. The Resilience Award, given for COVID-era performance, sat alongside Restaurant of the Year, Best Chef, and Service Excellence. The pay-off arrived four years after the no-layoff decision, and the people he had refused to fire were the ones receiving the awards.

A heart attack in Mullaitivu #

In June 2025, the founder of an eighteen-concept group with two MICHELIN designations and a Resilience Award sat in a small hospital in northern Sri Lanka, watching his mother fight for her life. Dr Parvathy Kanthasamy — the culinary practitioner whose recipes anchor Aliyaa, who became the brand’s spiritual advisor in 2007, and who is in many respects the founder of Cinnamon Group’s first kitchen even if she is not on the company’s letterhead — had survived a ninety-nine-percent right circumflex artery occlusion at Mullaitivu Hospital. The doctors who saved her were Jaffna-trained physicians working in a region most of the international press has stopped reporting on.

He wrote about it for Malay Mail, on 3 June 2025, in the most vulnerable on-record passage he has published.

“I’ve spent most of my adult life building things. Businesses, brands, homes, arguments. Always chasing — the next goal, the next deal, the next piece of validation in a world that measures worth by margins and milestones. But this past week, watching my mother fight for her life in a small hospital in northern Sri Lanka, I was reminded of something I had forgotten: not all heroes chase.”

The line is the post-triumph reflection that the eighteen-restaurant trajectory could not produce on its own. Three years on Asia’s 50 Best, MICHELIN recognition for two concepts, the Four Seasons relocation, the HAPA Resilience Award — the validation chase had earned everything an operator could earn in a Kuala Lumpur market structurally dominated by hotel groups. The mother’s near-death gave him the validation he had not asked for. The founder of a platform was reminded that the foundation was a family kitchen.

The eighteen concepts will continue. The bungalow that started everything is still serving curries from Jaffna, the helper has long since become a chef, and Dr Parvathy Kanthasamy is, by the time of writing, recovering. What changed in June 2025 was not the company. It was the founder’s accounting of why the company existed in the first place.

Not all heroes chase. Some of them, eventually, sit down to dinner.

Last updated: April 30, 2026