At Menlo Park’s Eylan, wood-fired wagyu ribeye arrives draped over a peppery coconut sauce while diners sip spiced rum cocktails under indoor olive trees. Large private parties gather in a dining room covered in AI-generated artwork of animals dressed in Indian-inspired royal clothes. According to co-owner Ayesha Thapar, the private rooms at her three acclaimed Cal-Indian restaurants — including San Francisco’s Copra and Palo Alto’s Ettan — are always booked.
Over the past 15 years, the Bay Area’s Indian fine dining scene has boomed along with its community. From 2010 to 2024, Indians were the fastest-growing major ethnic group in the region, where they now make up a larger share of the population than anywhere else in the country. One of the engines of the tech industry, they are also the region’s highest-earning ethnic group, with the median household making around $300,000 a year. Additionally, 10% of Indian American households in the Bay Area make more than $700,000.
These moneyed residents eagerly support a flourishing restaurant ecosystem that refracts some of the hundreds of culinary traditions of India’s many regions through ingredients from California farmers markets and the trappings of fine dining, such as tasting menus and sommeliers.
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Restaurants like Eylan directly reflect the trend. Thapar, a former real estate executive in India, and her husband, Nikesh Arora, the billionaire CEO of the cybersecurity company Palo Alto Networks, built the restaurant with customers like themselves in mind, locating it in a luxury development close to their home in wealthy Atherton.
Left: Chef Srijith Gopinathan and co-owner Ayesha Thapar opened Ettan in Palo Alto in 2020. Right: Gopinathan was the chef at Taj Campton Place in San Francisco when it became the first Indian restaurant to earn two Michelin stars.
Santiago Mejia, S.F. Chronicle; Randi Lynn Beach/For the S.F. Chronicle
Top: Chef Srijith Gopinathan and co-owner Ayesha Thapar opened Ettan in Palo Alto in 2020. Above: Gopinathan was the chef at Taj Campton Place in San Francisco when it became the first Indian restaurant to earn two Michelin stars.
Santiago Mejia, S.F. Chronicle; Randi Lynn Beach/For the S.F. Chronicle
Taj Campton Place was the first Indian restaurant in the world to receive two Michelin stars, which it earned with dishes such as Maine lobster with puffed black rice, cauliflower and coconut curry, shown in 2015.
Randi Lynn Beach/For the S.F. Chronicle
But Eylan, whose dining room is consistently 40% to 60% Indian, according to Thapar, has plenty of company. High-end restaurants make up 12% of the Bay Area’s Indian establishments versus just 2% to 6% in most major American cities, according to unpublished research by Krishnendu Ray, a food studies professor at New York University who has compiled a database of Indian restaurants in numerous cities around the world.
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“I thought someone would reach out about this at some point,” Srijith Gopinathan, chef-owner of Eylan, Copra and Ettan, said with a laugh. “Because there is a lot of money involved in this, and a lot of money this diaspora has.”
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No single chef has influenced the trajectory of Indian fine dining in the Bay Area more than Gopinathan. He began cooking at Taj Campton Place in San Francisco as executive chef in 2008, earning the restaurant its first Michelin star in 2011. Five years later, it became the first Indian restaurant in the world to receive two Michelin stars. His restaurants with Thapar — the first, Ettan, opened in 2020, while Eylan premiered last year — have continued to define the Cal-Indian cuisine that is distinctive to the Bay Area, combining South Indian cooking with the local ingredients and culinary sensibilities of Northern California.
“We (have) survived because of the Indian diaspora,” Thapar said. “They’re an important part of the social fabric of Silicon Valley. … They’re everywhere.”
Amber India in Mountain View, shown in 1995, was one of the breakthrough restaurants for Indian fine dining in the Bay Area with its signature butter chicken.
Liz Hafalia/S.F. Chronicle
The first generation of ambitious Indian dining
The story of the diverse Indian American community in the Bay Area has been one of rapid success. This Chronicle series explores how it happened.
Through much of the 1990s, most Indian restaurants in the West represented North Indian cuisines with creamy stews, smoky tandoori meats and breads such as naan. That started to change in 1995, when Tamarind opened in London and, a few years later, earned the world’s first Michelin star for an Indian restaurant. In New York, the late Floyd Cardoz exposed diners to innovative Indian fine dining at Tabla, which ran from 1998 to 2010.
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This was the beginning of what Gopinathan views as the first phase of Indian fine dining in North America and Europe.
In the Bay Area, prime examples of this phase include Amber India, opened in Mountain View in 1994 and quickly hailed by the Chronicle as the best Indian restaurant in the region with its iconic butter chicken, and chef Ajay Walia and Reena Miglani’s Saffron, which opened in 2003 on the Peninsula with particular attention paid to local produce.
Saffron, opened by chef Ajay Walia and Reena Miglani in 2003, was another groundbreaking restaurant in the early stages of Bay Area’s Indian fine dining scene.
Santiago Mejia/S.F. Chronicle
Perhaps the most groundbreaking representative of this initial wave, though, was San Francisco’s Dosa, opened by first-time restaurateurs Anjan Mitra and Emily Gilels in 2005. They expanded to the grand space on Fillmore Street that became Copra and later added a fast-casual Oakland outpost. The Dosa empire became known for its creative South Indian cuisine — deep-fried bondas made with Dungeness crab, or enormous dosas finished with white truffle oil — as well as its cocktails and well-appointed spaces. (The locations all closed between 2019 and 2021.)
Restaurants like Dosa were popular and attention-grabbing, with some landing on one of former Chronicle food critic Michael Bauer’s Top 100 restaurants lists. But this was before the real explosion of the Indian diaspora in the Bay Area: From 2010 to 2024, the Indian population more than doubled, to 488,000, while the total Bay Area population grew by only 7%. Even more moneyed diners were on the way, and so was the Michelin Guide.
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Dosa opened by first-time restaurateurs Anjan Mitra and Emily Gilels in 2005 — seen here in 2008 — grew to be a small empire of Indian restaurants, eventually moving into the space that is now home to Copra.
Laura Morton/For the S.F. Chronicle
Tasting menus, caviar and kulfi spectacles
It seemed ludicrous: $155 for the “Spice Route,” a Cal-Indian tasting menu. But Gopinathan’s Campton Place, the Taj Hotel’s restaurant in Union Square, showed that a new phase of high-end Indian dining had begun.
He launched two ambitious tasting menus in 2009, including one vegetarian. Take his “spice pot” at Campton Place, a riff on dahi puri, a traditional chaat that Gopinathan devoured as a child in Kerala: He layered potatoes, yogurt and chutneys into a real flower pot, then added dry ice for a wispy effect inspired by San Francisco’s fog. That level of presentation caught Michelin’s attention year after year, while overtly French fine dining approaches — such as $30 foie gras supplements — put his kitchen in the vanguard.
One of chef Srijith Gopinathan’s signature dishes at Taj Campton Place was the “spice pot,” a take on dahi puri that used dry ice to create an effect inspired by San Francisco fog.
Randi Lynn Beach/For the S.F. Chronicle
Paul Freedman, a Yale historian who has studied restaurants in America, said that as a culture becomes wealthier, its cuisine is viewed more favorably by the mainstream. But this doesn’t happen on its own. “How restaurants go from modest to elegant, some of it is prepared by this style and wealth question,” Freedman said, “and some people have to seize on it.”
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As the Indian population and its wealth grew in the Bay Area, some restaurateurs took the opportunity to move in bolder directions.
In 2014, Walia and Miglani of Saffron teamed up with Gopinathan to open Rasa, which they intended to be a place where Indians could take their bosses. Within two years, it earned a star in the 2016 Michelin Guide. Today, there’s a $165 caviar service on the menu, the black pearls girded by a subtle mango chile chutney. Miglani is proud to say that her dosas at Rasa are among the most expensive in the region at $24 and up, some 2 feet long and made with house-churned butter.
Many in the Indian community are excellent home cooks, Miglani said; when they visit fancy restaurants, they want to try dishes they couldn’t make themselves. Well-to-do Indians flocked from Sacramento, San Jose and San Francisco to check out Rasa, she said, even more so once Michelin gave its approval. They’d bring their parents, who would FaceTime family in India to flaunt the heights of Indian restaurants where they now lived. Corporate workers booked tables to show their colleagues what Indian food was like with Culinary Institute of America grads in the kitchen. “Rasa really made the Indian diaspora proud,” she said.
Left: The dosas at Rasa in Burlingame are among the most expensive in the region, starting at $24.
Right: Rasa, which earned a Michelin star in 2016, offers a $165 caviar service.
Photos by Santiago Mejia/S.F. Chronicle
Top: The dosas at Rasa in Burlingame are among the most expensive in the region, starting at $24.
Above: Rasa, which earned a Michelin star in 2016, offers a $165 caviar service.
Photos by Santiago Mejia/S.F. Chronicle
Ray, the food studies professors, said Indian restaurants followed the same trail Italian food once did — but faster. Italians, he said, were considered second-class citizens through the early 20th century, while their food was deemed, among other things, too spicy. Italian restaurants largely weren’t celebrated by the elite until the late 1970s and early 1980s, meaning it took three to four generations for Italian food to gain cosmopolitan status. For the wave of Indian immigrants that began arriving following the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, it has taken just one, according to Ray.
“This is a very quick upward mobility of a group,” Ray said. “The whole world has become a different world due to digital economies, thanks in part to Indians.”
The current phase of Indian fine dining, which began recently, according to Gopinathan, is marked by “a nuclear explosion” both in the number of high-end Indian restaurants across the U.S. and in terms of the variety of regional cuisines on display.
The team behind splashy San Francisco Indian restaurant Rooh, for instance, expanded with the theatrical Fitoor in San Jose in 2024 before doing it again in Santa Monica. Former Rooh chef Sujan Sarkar opened Indienne in Chicago in 2022, earning a Michelin star in its first year, followed by a James Beard nomination for the chef in 2024. He and brother Pujan Sarkar then came back to San Francisco to open Tiya that same year, bringing the city another Indian tasting menu.
The momentum in the Bay Area shows no signs of slowing. To address its moneyed community, Saffron and Rasa rolled out a membership, with perks such as access to hard-to-find spices and other ingredients, for $400 per quarter. Most members are South Asian, Walia and Miglai said.
The TikTok-friendly tableside kulfi experience at Jashn in Santa Clara costs $24. The average customer check is $60 to $90, according to the restaurant, which plans to offer a tasting menu that will start at $125.
Santiago Mejia/S.F. Chronicle
In another sign of the scene’s firepower, its TikTok-ification is well underway. At Jashn, a Santa Clara restaurant that opened last year, co-founder Reshmi Nair, partner Vital Shetty and chef Siddhesh Parab came up with a showstopping dessert. The house-made ice cream is first reduced for 48 hours, then made into a $24 tableside kulfi experience, complete with liquid nitrogen and rose petals. “A lot of the Indian diaspora is technology-forward and well traveled,” Nair said. “They understand their cuisine and they understand California cuisine, too.”
The average customer bill is $60 to $90, according to the restaurant, and 60% of its guests are Indian. Success has led to greater aspirations: The trio plan to roll out a tasting menu of seven to nine courses that’ll cost $125 to $160.
So what’s next for high-end Indian? Ray, the NYU professor, said he is still waiting for ultra-niche, highly personal Indian cuisine to hit the U.S. In a 2025 essay, he lamented the lack of representation of specific Northeast Indian cuisines — herbaceous ones built around bamboo shoots, soybeans and pork that have “taken Indian cities by storm over the last decade.”
Gopinathan, for his part, said he has plans to continue mining India’s regional cuisines for his devoted audience. South India alone encapsulates at least 20 different ones, by his count. “There are so many small empires in India,” he said, “so many small kingdoms.”
Dining and Cooking