We didn’t want to cook for Thanksgiving and neither did Kirsten and Greg so we all decided to eat out. Understasndably, there aren’t a lot restaurants open on Thanksgiving, but fortunately Copra was. We love eating here and expected it would be even more fun with four of us so that we could order more dishes.
Andrea and I started off with cocktails – the Lemon Chili for Andrea (very on brand for her) and the Due Dilligence for me which I picked because it sounded unusual with dill as the first ingredient listed. The dill was relatively mild and ther was more of the salt and pepper from the rim, herbaceousness from the Suze, and smokiness from the agaves which seemed basically like a mezcal, but they didn’t name it as such.
For our Kadi, we ordered the Perigord Black Truffle Soft Egg Appam. The truffle was was quite aromatic. The appam had the texture of a crêpe and was a bit difficult to share until we just cut it up. Egg yolk and truffle, can’t go wrong.
From the Little dishes, we ordered the Chutney Palette for the Table, the Shrimp Vennai Roast, and the Crispy Sambal Peppers. With the chutneys, there were 4 of them provided which all sounded quite interesting although the most unique one was the brunt chili/tamarind one which was quite dark and had a good kick to it. It was also just a little unexpected because I’m so used to having tamarind when it’s sweet. The ghost chili one was disappointingly not very hot.
The shrimp dish was listed as one of Chef Sri’s favorite. It was a very flavorful shrimp dish with the shrimp seasoned with chili chutney, brown butter, lime. The sambal peppers were crisp as promised with a bit of additional texture from the pumpkin sees. This was topped with the green sambal which we have never seen before (having only known the typical red sambal condiment.
For our Large dishes, we ordered the Black Cod Pollichathu which Kirsten and Greg wanted to try and looked great to us. There were so many other things we wanted to try, but we settled on the Lamb Shoulder Chettinad and the Vegetables of the day. The vegetables were quite nice because it came as three smaller dishes of different vegetable mixes – smoked black lentil curry, cabbage and pumpkin seeds thoran, and Kongunadu style sunchoke varuval. Each of these was delicious in their own way. The lamb was a solid dish, but fairly typical. The black cod though was a very pleasant surprise. We were instructed to open up the banana leaf, pour the moilee broth over the fish, and let it sit for at least 2 minutes. Cooking the dish in the banana leaf essentially steams it and it was of course perfectly moist, but it was that broth that really made the dish.
All in all, it was a fantastic meal and we certainly didn’t miss turkey or all the effort to cook one!
Leave a Reply