Ettan

Palo Alto. Ettan is the downtown restaurant from Srijith Gopinathan and Ayesha Thapar — modern Cal-Indian cooking in a dining room built for Silicon Valley's evening trade. The engagement was bar-program-only: the kitchen was covered, the front of house was covered, the bar needed a program that could hold up alongside the food.

Equipment and layout: coordinated directly with the project architects on bar-side specification — well layout, service-path dimensions, ice and cold-storage capacity, the equipment mix that lets two bartenders run a full room without sandbagging service. The bar had to operate inside the kitchen's dining-room rhythm, not fight it.

Beverage R&D: three complete rounds of development and tasting against the kitchen's regional pantry. The Cal-Indian register is specific — cardamom, curry leaf, tamarind, kokum — and the cocktail program needed to reach into that pantry without turning into theme-park work. Three rounds because you don't land that balance on the first pass.

The P&L side: full beverage program budget with pour-cost targets, revenue projections, and line-by-line assumptions the operators could run the program against. The spreadsheet set has outlasted the engagement — as it should. Ettan has since earned Michelin recognition, and Gopinathan and Thapar are 2026 James Beard Award finalists for Outstanding Restaurateur.