Black Pepper, the second restaurant from a longtime Malaysian chef-owner in Milpitas, is now open at 1029 El Camino Real in Menlo Park.
Black Pepper soft-opened recently at the former site of Menlo Hub restaurant, which closed in 2014.
Owner Kay Tan also operates Banana Leaf in Milpitas. The menu at Black Pepper is similar, with a range of Malaysian as well as Thai, Indian and Chinese dishes.
Appetizers include roti prata ($4, made from scratch, Ms. Tan said in an interview), chicken satay ($16) and gado gado ($14, an Indonesian salad with jicama root, lettuce, cucumber, fried prawn cake, seared tofu and peanut sauce).
Entrees include a range of meat and seafood dishes, from Singaporean black pepper chicken ($18) to cumin lamb chops ($28) and grilled Chilean sea bass wrapped in banana leaf ($36).
There are also several noodle and rice dishes.
“This is the type of food I grew up eating,” said Ms. Tan, who promises the menu will grow as the restaurant settles in, with new items that aren’t available at Banana Leaf.
With a full liquor license, there’s also a cocktail menu with drinks such as the “Mai-laysian Coco Rummy Tai (rum, lime, pineapple juice, peach syrup and coconut palm syrup) and the “Tequila Mangga” (tequila, mango, lime, rambutan and mango juice). All are $12 each.
Ms. Tan came to the United States from Malaysia after high school and said she worked in restaurants and bars in San Francisco and throughout Peninsula while she attended college at San Francisco State University.
After graduating, she worked in marketing and sales at a technology company, but eventually left it to pursue her “dream” of owning a restaurant.
She opened Banana Leaf with her husband 18 years ago.
The El Camino Real space has been renovated, with a full bar, second-floor seating area and large open kitchen. The restaurant ran into some roadblocks with the city when it proposed a larger footprint for the space more than a year ago.
Black Pepper is open Monday-Thursday, 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. and 5-9 p.m.; Friday, 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. and 5-10 p.m.; and Saturday, 11:45 a.m. to 10 p.m. The restaurant is closed on Sunday.
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