Soon after this restaurant opened in 2014, Embarcadero Media blogger Anita Felicelli (whose own family roots are from near Chennai) also reported on it, giving some background that I found informative on the broader topic of Chettinad cuisine: Web Link (". . . Perhaps most exciting for me was that this is a restaurant that hasn't tamed its spice for non-Indian tastebuds. It's kind of rare, even in Silicon Valley with its large Indian and Indian-American population, to get delicious food that has the level of spice and the type of food that you might get in Chennai . . . Chennai Kings has a wider range of South Indian non-vegetarian options—chicken, fish and goat . . . If you're not Indian, but have an adventurous palate, I'm pretty sure you'll like this spot.") I've enjoyed discovering some locally unusual dishes there.

Anita's blog post got some circulation, and may have even helped to get word out about Chennai Kings, which as noted in the article above, last fall became one of the unusually large number of restaurants in this area chosen for review and recommendation in the 2017 Bay-Area Michelin Guide: Web Link