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The creators of Palo Alto’s Ettan are launching what they say is their “most polished product yet:” Eylan, a Cal-Indian restaurant focused on live-fire cooking.
Chef Srijith Gopinathan and restaurateur Ayesha Thapar’s newest restaurant opens Wednesday, Jan. 15, at The Villa Menlo Park, newly opened within the Stanford’s Middle Plaza development, less than a 10-minute drive from Ettan. The menu features seasonal ingredients and pan-Indian flavors, with influence from the Bay Area’s culinary landscape.
“We’re trying to give people the diversity and the depth of what the Indian story looks like because people tend to box India in a very certain space,” Thapar said.
Thapar, who also co-created Los Altos’ Little Blue Door and San Francisco’s Copra with Gopinathan, explained that Indian cuisine hasn’t yet achieved mainstream popularity to the extent that other cuisines, like Italian or Japanese, have. People tend to imagine Indian cuisine as either North Indian (butter chicken, naan, etc.) or South Indian (dosa, sambar, etc.), but Indian cuisine can be much more, Thapar said. For example, Eylan is offering ceviche and Kobe beef with Indian flavors.
“We wanted to create a concept that was built around a wood-fired grill and to show a different aspect of the Indian cuisine that may be viewed as a little bit more approachable, less ethnic, more global (and) more influenced by California,” Thapar said.
Blue shrimp with lemongrass, ajwain and turmeric at Eylan in Menlo Park. Photo by Chad Santo Tomas. 
Smoked tomatillo butter chicken at Eylan in Menlo Park. Photo by Chad Santo Tomas. 
Eylan’s mutabar comes in two variations, one filled with sweet potato and the other with Dungeness crab. Photo by Chad Santo Tomas. 
Celeriac and pineapple with a spicy murabba glaze at Eylan in Menlo Park. Photo by Chad Santo Tomas. 
Pomegranate chicken kebab with lime vinaigrette at Eylan in Menlo Park. Photo by Chad Santo Tomas.
Eylan’s menu includes Indian-inspired snacks and small plates, like taro root chaat with winter vegetables, as well as puchkas (spherical deep-fried hollow shells made from flour) filled with chickpeas, green grapes and chaas (a cultured dairy drink). Find innovative Indian breads, like mutabar with sweet potato or Dungeness crab, as well as flaxseed poee with smoked eggplant choka, avocado thecha and burani raita, a yogurt sauce.
Vegetarian live-fired items include celeriac and pineapple with spicy murabba (a fruit preserve) glaze, as well as king trumpet mushrooms in achaari spice rub with smoked chili ghee. Nonvegetarian live-fired dishes include blue shrimp with lemongrass, ajwain (a pungent spice seed) and turmeric; pomegranate chicken kebab with lime vinaigrette; and whole sea bream with a spiced scallion crust, coconut and fish bone broth and nine grain kitchadi (a rice and lentil dish).
For Gopinathan, wood-fired cooking takes him back to his childhood in India. Born in Kerala and raised in Tamil Nadu, he didn’t have access to gas cooking until middle school.
“Eylan’s cuisine is focusing not just in one part of India, it’s actually the length and breadth of India,” Gopinathan said. “It’s a very enjoyable, very fun kind of cuisine … focusing on the essence of live-fire cooking from across the country.”
The dessert menu includes a masala chai “sundae” with toasted ghee cake, whipped bourbon milk, cardamom-soaked cherries and a spiced crumble, as well as a shaved rose lassi featuring fluffy ice flavored with gulkand, a sweet preserve of rose petals, and strawberries.
One facet of Eylan that stands out from Gopinathan and Thapar’s previous projects is the wine program, they said.
“With Eylan, we wanted wine to be a feature of the story … and hence we really built the restaurant keeping wine in mind, which I don’t think we did for the other two,” Thapar said.
Eylan offers over 200 bottles from classic regions like Burgundy, Champagne, Piedmont and California, curated by wine director Andre Sydnor, who also created Copra’s wine program.
Cocktails at Eylan in Menlo Park. From left, Dirty Spritz, Not a Trace and Flavor Flav. Photo by Chad Santo Tomas. 
Eylan’s Companion is made with bourbon, Earl Grey, dry vermouth and PX sherry. Photo by Chad Santo Tomas. 
A bartender pours Eylan’s Everything Gimlet into a glass. Photo by Chad Santo Tomas. 
A tandoori margarita at Eylan. Photo by Chad Santo Tomas.
The bar menu, created by West Bev Consulting, includes nonalcoholic, low-ABV and full-proof beverages, all influenced by the flavors of India. Eylan’s Week in the Knees is a nonalcoholic milk punch made with Pathfinder amaro (a hemp-based nonalcoholic spirit), spiced tamarind syrup, lemon and Demerara sugar. Low-ABV options include Time Out, made with vermouth blanc, lime, lemongrass and prosecco, and full-proof options include Bazaar Paloma with tamarind, grapefruit, mezcal and warm spices.
The 148-seat restaurant includes a covered patio and a 50-seat private dining room on the second floor. Three olive trees stand prominently in the main dining room, and the private dining room features AI-generated artwork.
“We don’t force fit a concept into a location,” Thapar said. “We almost build a concept for a location. We look at what the location warrants, and so we had this particular location in mind. From a design perspective, we wanted to be very bold, very colorful.”
Gopinathan and Thapar anticipate the restaurant’s location will bring in customers from Woodside and Atherton, a demographic that hasn’t been as prevalent at Ettan, as well as attract customers who aren’t too keen about the lack of parking in downtown Palo Alto.
“I hope that Eylan is viewed as a totally different and unique product from the other two that we’ve created,” Thapar said. “So I hope that when people compare it, it stands up against the other two, and I also hope that it’s different from the other two.”
The pair wish Eylan, like Ettan, becomes both a beloved neighborhood restaurant and a destination restaurant.
“I think we have all the ingredients to become the newest sweetheart of Peninsula,” Gopinathan said.
Gopinathan and Thapar aren’t stopping at Eylan — they’re working on a line of food products and are in the early stages of a new project “very different to the other three (restaurants)” that revolves “strongly around a drinks concept.”
“As long as what we have to say is different, we’ll do a new brand,” Thapar said. If not, they’ll open additional locations of their existing restaurant concepts, but not in the Bay Area, she said.
Eylan, 500 El Camino Real, Menlo Park, Instagram: @eylanrestaurant. Open Tuesday to Sunday from 5-10 p.m.
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Correction: A caption has been modified from a previous version to reflect updated information.
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