Tonight’s dinner was at Copra. Andrea and I ate here just a couple months ago, but we were glad to eat here with our new friend Sara who we sat next to at the Outstanding in the Field dinner in Pescadero. It was definitely more enjoyable to have another person with us for dinner since we could just order that much more food that we could all try!

We started with cocktails. Sara had the Lemon Chili cocktail that Andrea had last time, but it wasn’t nearly so spicy hot as the one Andrea had (which is too bad, because I thought that was kind of unique, but probably was too much for most people and expectations).

The menu is still broken up into 3 sections – Kadi, which are appetizer sized dishes, Little, and Large. For the Kadi, we started with the oysters (chili, tamarind, and soy which were very tasty and the Mamu Cutlet with raita which I found to also be very good.

For the Little dishes, we the Betel Leaf Toast, the Shrimp Vennai Roast, and the Thattukada Fried Chicken. My least favorite was the chicken dish, primarily because it was chicken breast which I don’t really like, but it was still very flavorful (fennel, chiles, pepper, shallots, masala crumbs for the fried part, but also didn’t stick entirely to the chicken). The Betel Leaf was just a bit too much of a fried dish for my preference, but again also quite tasty (mango, avocado, cucumber, sprouts). The shrimp was also very flavorful seasoned with chili chutney,, brown butter, curry leaves, and lime.

For our Large dishes, we went with the Dosa, the hamachi collar, and the lamb dishes. The dosa was fine and served with a green sambal, tomato chutney, and onion sambhar. The hamachi collar, also served with coconut rice and snow peas was good. My favorite dish was definitely the lamb shoulder that was in a stew of Chettinad spices and a mini dosa. The stew also went quite well with the coconut rice from the hamachi collar dish.

We were all pretty full at this point, but of course we had to try some dessert, so we went with three. We had the “Gods Own” Coconut Variation which was like a type of halo halo. The semi-frozen bay leaf slice which was fine and benefitted from the kumquat and sugarcane syrup. Lastly was the Watalappan which was like a spiced flan on top of a pineapple slice with some cream. Tough for me to say which was my favorite since I’m always a sucker for eggy desserts, but I have to say the variety of bits of flavor (have to dig your spoon all the way down) in a bite of the Coconut Variation was very enjoyable.

In any case, we had a great time here again and even more so with Sara joining us. We’re just bummed that she’s headed back to Paris soon, but hopefully we’ll be able to dine with her again when we are out there next month!