One of the Bay Area’s Best Chefs Just Opened a Live-Fire Indian Restaurant in Menlo Park
One of our favorite chefs is expanding his Bay Area mini-empire yet again.
Srijith Gopinathan opens on Wednesday his latest Indian restaurant in Menlo Park, California, Eater San Francisco reported this week. Eylan, a partnership between the chef and Ayesha Thapar, is an ode to live-fire Indian cuisine, with inspiration from the almost two decades Gopinathan has spent cooking in the area. It’s now his fourth restaurant, following Little Blue Door, Ettan, and Copra—our best new restaurant of 2023.
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“Live-fire cooking for me is not new,” Gopinathan told Eater. “When I grew up in my village back home, we did not have gas cooking back in my village, we were cooking everything by live fire. It’s almost like going back and revisiting what I’m used to in the old days.”
Starters include dishes such as a nontraditional Hamachi crudo with fermented red peppers, Thai chiles, and a spiced Indian buttermilk called chaas, with sesame-leaf pagoda as a vessel for the fish. Chaas is also found in pani puri, with puchkas filled with chickpeas, green grapes, and the buttermilk. And caviar service comes alongside fried maitake mushroom pakoras with coconut crunch.
As for larger dishes, Gopinathan is particularly excited about a black cod marinated in tamarind, turmeric, coconut, and chickpeas, served with coconut rice and kohlrabi, Eater noted. The chef also called out sea bream with a spiced scallion crust and his version of butter chicken, which takes a halved Cornish hen and pairs it with a tomatillo-based sauce. In the future, Eylan will offer a five- or six-course tasting menu to complement the a la carte options.
Playing off of the plates, there’s a drinks menu with both full-proof and low-ABV cocktails. The former list includes quaffs such as the Bazaar Paloma (mezcal, tamarind, grapefruit), while the latter encompasses sips like the Weak in the Knees (a milk punch with Pathfinder amaro, spiced tamarind syrup, lemon, and demerara sugar).
Gopinathan and Thapar’s restaurants are well known for their design elements as well, a feature that is carried on at Eylan. Here, Art Deco touches come across in geometric-patterned floors and brass details. Earth tones are incorporated throughout, and three olive trees serve as the centerpiece of the restaurant, along with a mural designed by Thapar herself, depicting the Indian story.
Eylan is a welcome new addition to the duo’s illustrious restaurant career thus far.
Click here to see all the images of Eylan.
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