Tuesday, November 27, 2018

FOODIE SPECIAL... Goa-ing Gourmet


 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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