Goa-ing Gourmet
How the land of surf and sand is looking away from shacks
and at uber-food experiences that focus on historicity, local flavours and
experimentation
“Please Sir, Mr God of Death Don’t make it my
turn today Not today There is fish curry for dinner.”
— Bakibab Borkar, Goan poet (1910-84)
The fish curry I am polishing off at Tempero, a
restaurant serving Catholic Goan food at the newly launched ITC Grand Goa,
makes me repeat the lines of the poet Bakibab Borkar. Sacramenta Carvalho aka
Sarita, a 53-year-old home cook-turned-restaurant chef, has rustled up the
curry. It is bursting with the freshness of ground masala and the sourness of
kokum and is only mildly pungent from chillies, which lend it a distinctive
ochre colour — different from the other home-style curry of the state, the
haldi-rich hooman of the Saraswat community.
You may sometimes find hooman-style curries in the
canteen eateries popular for their thalis. But a really good Catholic version
of the curry that is not touristy or generic is hard to find outside homes.
Carvalho’s is a family recipe — and the exact proportions and combinations of
ingredients remain a closely guarded secret. She has the formidable reputation
of being the finest cook in her village, Utorda in South Goa. But she is more
than that. She consulted at the erstwhile Park Hyatt, a property that has now
been taken over by ITC, before she took a break. Now, her family has persuaded
her to return to the hotel kitchen — she is in charge of Tempero, the hotel’s
speciality restaurant that seems to be upping the game for high-quality Goan
food with not just the curry but her recipes for dishes like cafreal and
bebinca.
Tempero, however, is not the only restaurant that is
stirring things up in the land of sea and surf. For the last few years, Goa has
been earning a reputation as a gourmet destination. Instead of shacks and
tourist traps, the accent has shifted to upgraded food experiences that stress
on historicity, regional roots, experimentation or just individual talent.
To & Fro
Well-heeled domestic travellers who come in through
the year from Mumbai and Delhi are armed with lists of must-visit restaurants.
Food and drink experiences have become as much a draw as the beaches. The
result is a spouting of quality restaurants, both mom-andpop ones and those run
by big hotel or restaurant companies. This season saw two big launches in Goa.
Olive opened a pretty blue-and-white space at one of the most coveted
sea-facing spots in Vagator and has been running packed.
Diva, Ritu Dalmia’s iconic Delhi restaurant, too,
opened in Calangute, making this its first outpost outside Delhi.
Why are established chefs and restaurateurs
gravitating towards Goa? Restaurateur AD Singh of Olive explains: “As the cool
overseas market has dwindled for Goa, domestic tourism has really grown. So,
for most of the year, it receives visitors whom we are already catering to in
cities like Delhi and Mumbai. Then, in winters, there is another set of tourists
-- international visitors and Indians who live abroad and who largely visit
only Goa and not other Indian cities. Their tastes are sophisticated and they
make for a great audience for us.”
Another big catalyst for the emergence of the state
as an influential dining destination has to do with its new migrants — people
from Delhi and Mumbai who have made Goa their home in the last five years.
Villages like Assagao, for instance, now have entire enclaves populated by
these urban professionals who have shifted to Goa to live and work and enjoy a
better lifestyle not available in crammed and polluted metros. These are people
with cosmopolitan tastes, who are not averse to spending on eating out.
Restaurants like Gunpowder, owned by Satish Warrier,
in Assagao owe their huge success to this clientele. Gunpowder, which had
started the Hauz Khas Village makeover in Delhi in 2009, downed its shutters as
the market got overcrowded and as Warrier decided to move to Goa in 2012.
Sprawled in the backyard of an old Portuguese house that also houses the design
studio People Tree, Gunpowder is bohochic and offers quality food from
peninsular India in its salubrious setting. It is now a north Goa institution
with visitors even at the nearby W Hotel planning itineraries that include a
meal at the restaurant.
Matsya, which shut last year, after running for three
years in a difficultto-find-location near Arambol, had become an urban legend.
Known to the tribe of upmarket, fashionable tourists as well as the new Goa
society, this was a unique freestyle restaurant where chef Gome Galily cooked
several courses of whatever his heart desired for meals priced at a fixed ₹2,500 per person. His influences
ranged from French to Asian cuisines but the ingredients were seasonal, picked
from the neighbour’s garden, and the fish bought fresh from sellers whom the
chef interacted with daily. A restaurant concept like this may not have worked
anywhere else in India, but in Goa it did well, prompting Mumbai’s stylish
cooking space Magazine Street Kitchen to host a successful Matsya pop-up in the
maximum city. Now, the maverick chef plans to spring pop-ups in different parts
of Goa to find newer audience.
Then, there is Bomras, which ran for years as a
hidden gem on the strength of its Burmese-meets-Goan food. The last two-three
years saw it catapulted to stardom on a national level, thanks to Goa’s
emergence as a culinary destination. As more and more people from Mumbai and
Delhi began to discover it, the upshot was that its flavours travelled with
them back to the big cities. This year, when the stylish Mumbai bar and
restaurant Miss T opened in Colaba (a collaboration between the Woodside Inn
team and The Table), it had on board Bomra’s Bawmra Jap as consultant chef. The
French restaurant Mustard from Goa, too, opened in Worli a few months ago.
La La Local
The cocktail bar at W Hotel, India’s only W, in north
Goa is not just the best in state but of the country probably. There’s gin
infused with local herbs and fruit, tonic with real vanilla, vodka with lemon
grass and refreshing tropical cocktails with coconut water. Everything relies
on the freshness of ingredients sourced locally. Since Goa has also been seeing
a surge in liquors and spirits made in the state, thanks to easier laws, many of
these find a pride of place in mixology. Chef Tanveer Kwatra, who heads the
hotel’s F&B, explains how new gins made in Goa like Hapusa (with Indian
juniper and botanicals of mango and turmeric) launched last year and Stranger
& Sons, another craft gin launched this year, are the highlights of a
programme that focuses on chic and high quality.
If gourmet destinations like Parma in Italy and
Catalonia in Spain highlight local gastronomy, chefs like Kwatra are working
hard to build similar experiences in Goa too. Kwatra tailors a cooking session
for guests where they can go fishing with local fishers, bring in the catch and
cook it with the chef ’s help at Spice Traders, the Asian speciality
restaurant. Since it is high tide when I visit, we settle for buying squid from
the local Mapusa market and cooking it in a Thai-inspired yellow curry done
with kachchi haldi that is in season and also triphal, related to Sichuan
pepper, widely used in Saraswat and Konkani food. It’s an inventive dish that
can win any gastronomy prize anywhere in the world — a level of cooking we
don’t often see in other Indian cities.
Then, there are baking and sourdoughmaking workshops
such as the one run by Sujith Sumitran in his riverside Portuguese villa.
Sumitran moved to Goa from Bengaluru three years ago. He now has a cult
following in and outside Goa. Old breads of the state such as poi and pao are
also seeing a revival.
What this means is the evolution of an entire
lifestyle. “Goa is not just about restaurants, which are all upping their game,
but the re-emergence of an entire lifestyle revolving around new ideas and
experiments because there are enough consumers for these,” says The Table’s
Gauri Devidayal. Spaces such as The Project Café, a 130-year-old country
mansion that seeks to promote the “art of living in Goa” through design,
pop-ups and artisanal, healthy food, fit into this emerging lifestyle. It’s not
just retail. Experiments such as Ajay Naik’s, who quit his tech job to set up a
hydroponic farm that grows vegetables in water, or the spanking-new indoor fish
market reminiscent of San Francisco’s in south Goa set up by panchayats are all
contributing to this “global Goan” gastronomy.
Finally, there is the return of the prodigals.
Saligao Stories in the eponymous village is a quaint restaurant within a
heritage home, where owner Anisha Hassan celebrates her mixed Goan and
Hyderabadi roots. Both the cuisines are on offer as well as a sprinkling of
international bites. What makes this distinctive is the personalised way in
which Hassan, who has come back to her mother’s roots, tells her story through
photographs, an intimately designed space and family recipes.
Also returning to her roots is Shilarna Vaze, or chef
Chinu as she is popularly known on TV where she has cooking shows. A Goa girl,
Vaze studied at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris in 2004, met her Swiss husband there
and both returned to Goa to set up a restaurant called Gaia. But better
prospects in Mumbai meant that the couple moved to the big city where they ran
a luxury catering company. Now, with Goa’s re-emergence, Gaia is back in
business in Goa, we hear.
It was always the land of susegade but now there is a
new energy to Goa’s relaxed air and — new gourmet pleasures between its sun and
sea.
Anoothi Vishal
The
writer looks at restaurants, food trends and culinary conceptsERM
ETM 18NOV18
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