Copra – San Francisco

In Orange County, the words “elevated Indian” immediately bring two restaurants to mind – Fullerton’s award-winning Indian/Pakistani Khan Saab Desi Craft Kitchen and Tustin’s lightly upscale Yellow Chilli – but San Francisco’s Copra is something different. Where Khan Saab goes dark and smoky, Copra is light and bright, and while Yellow Chili sticks just to Indian dishes, Copra zigs and zags between Indian and Sri Lankan cuisines, favoring vegetarian and seafood items without excluding traditional meats. The result is a single-page menu that somehow manages to cover a lot of bases efficiently, offered within a space that looks like an off-white box from the outside before revealing a lush, roped-off garden party on the inside.

Virtually every item we ordered was pleasantly disarming in some way. A plate of six oysters promising fermented chilis, white soy, and tamarind was a perfect fusion of raw seafood with a gently soured Buffalo wing-like sauce, minus any trace of butter; “slow-cooked octopus” was a full spice-rubbed tentacle atop a spiral of lightly tangy curried yogurt, made even better with brightening slices of grapefruit, radish, and lime. Shrimp Vennai Roast, described as the chef’s favorite, richly spiced a half-dozen shrimp with curry, lime, chili chutney, and brown butter, with instructions to squeeze a lime across the top and enjoy the shrimp with matchsticks of cooling cucumber.

The act of assembling dishes went a little too far into the DIY category with the Black Cod Pollichathu. This entree arrived with three separate bowls – one containing a banana leaf-wrapped piece of cod, the next a mulligatawny-ish moilee broth, and the last a sizable mound of ghee rice with fried onions and pineapple chunks. We could barely understand our server’s multi-step assembly instructions over the restaurant’s din; ideally, Copra’s chef would teach servers to finish the prep for guests at the table, instead. Even so, the cod was excellent – tender, layered in flavors, and perfectly paired with the buttery, fruity rice.