A palatial home for rarely seen Indian dishes opens in S.F.

Gopinathan is best known for his Cal-Indian fine-dining fare at Campton Place at the high-end Taj Campton Place hotel in Union Square. (The once Michelin-starred restaurant remains temporarily closed andwas not awarded stars this year.) Gopinathan and co-owner Thapar opened thebuzzy Ettan in Palo Altoin 2019 andfast-casual Little Blue Door in Los Altoslast year. He left Campton Place after 15 years last summer in part to focus on this new project.

Copra, devoted to the food he grew up eating on the southern coast of India, is his most personal restaurant yet. It will spotlight South Indian dishes that aregrowing in popularity across the countrybut are still rare in the Bay Area and beyond.

“America does not have this,” Gopinathan said.

At Copra, there will be no butter chicken, no basmati rice, no naan. Expect lots of seafood dishes like pollichathu — spiced black cod cooked in banana leaf — and Konkan crab curry simmered in roasted coconut, shallots, ginger and garlic. Diners will be able to sop up the crab sauce with appam, a thin, crepe-like carb from Kerala made from fermented rice flour and fermented coconut. The tangy appam is cooked in a special pan until it turns golden brown on the edges and curves up like a bowl. Meat dishes will include masala-roasted bone marrow and Thattukada fried chicken, a street food from Trivandrum, the capital of Kerala.

Coconut shows up throughout the menu at Copra, which is named for the dried flesh of a coconut. That ingredient is roasted and served with lamb chops and chili achaar. Sundal, a South Indian dish made with lentils or chickpeas and coconut, is served here with black chickpeas, crisp Shinko pears, slivers of raw mango and nasturtiums.

For most of Gopinathan’s upbringing, butter was an exclusive ingredient only accessible to wealthy people. He’s using it at Copra for shrimp vennai, which are marinated in a mixture of spicy chutney and lentils (the legumes crisp up when cooked and create a crust on the shrimp) and then finished with brown butter and a squeeze of lime.

The menu will spotlight unusual varieties of South Indian rice, from small baby rice to matta rice, a robust-tasting grain from Kerala. Because little wheat is grown in South India, much of Copra’s menu is gluten-free.

The flavors of India’s southern coast are deeply intertwined with those of nearby Sri Lanka, Gopinathan said. Copra’s menu will reflect that connection in dishes like kothu roti, a popular street food dish of chopped roti and meat.

Cocktails were developed by Bay Area drink specialists West Bev Consulting, who come with experience at top restaurants including San Francisco’s the Morris and Che Fico. They play with ingredients like sugarcane, fermented coconut water, turmeric and naruneendi, or Indian sarsaparilla.

Gopinathan has wanted to open a restaurant serving this kind of food for more than decade. He always thought he’d have to do it in a small hole-in-the-wall. But Thapar, a former real estate developer in India, helped deliver the impressive 140-seat Fillmore Street space.

他们把它变成一个引人注目、热带restaurant that, like Ettan, is sure to be a darling of social media feeds. Enormous vines with faux greenery hang from the super high ceilings, dangling into the dining room like in a jungle. Look up from the bar, and even more ropes of varying sizes and colors hang dramatically from the ceiling. One section of the dining room is separated into a more private “greenhouse,” partially enclosed by fake plants, macrame chandeliers and walls made of hanging ropes. Rattan, cane, clay vessels and pops of emerald green decorate the entire restaurant. Wallpaper depicting lush banana plants and coconut trees remind Gopinathan of backyards in his native Kerala, where green peppercorn plants would creep up coconut trees.

On the second floor is a sleek mezzanine that overlooks the dining room and will be used for private events, as well as overflow seating when it’s not booked. Copra will serve only dinner to start, and later add weekend brunch.

Winning two Michelin stars, as Campton Place did during Gopinathan’s tenure, is the kind of achievement many chefs only dream of. But opening Copra feels like reaching a different, more meaningful career milestone. He said this is his first restaurant where he’d feel comfortable bringing his mother.

“This is my peak of the peak when it comes to cooking food,” he said. “It’s emotional.”

Copra. Opening Saturday, Feb. 18. 5:30-10 p.m. Tuesday-Thursday, 5-10 p.m. Friday-Saturday, 5-9 p.m. Sunday. 1700 Fillmore St., San Francisco.instagram.com/coprarestaurant

Reach Elena Kadvany:elena.kadvany@sfchronicle.comTwitter: @ekadvany