https://www.gqindia.com/live-well/content/gq-hype-india-best-restaurant-and-best-bar
ON THE MORNING OF 28 March 2020, just four days after India plunged into “the world’s strictest lockdown” to combat COVID-19, chef Avinash Martins set up to cook in front of his phone camera in the garden of his ancestral home in Velim, in the rural hinterland of South Goa. His first full-length video featured kingfish head cooked with raw mangoes from the ancient trees overhead. In a world sectioned off into quarantine isolation, it struck a chord and quickly racked up thousands of views. Martins had already been thinking about shifting gears at Cavatina, the steady and well-regarded restaurant he runs with his wife Tiz Lyngdoh in nearby Benaulim. Now the talented 41-year-old resolved that cooking by the numbers with imported ingredients no longer made sense. Henceforth, his supply chain would be his own backyard in the gorgeously beautiful taluka of Salcete, and his food would celebrate the farmers, foragers, and fishermen who toiled to provide his ingredients. The term “farm to table” is routinely bandied about in India, but in this case it was no gimmick. From the moment Martins started implementing his new culinary blueprint, it was readily apparent he was in the sweet spot of everything desirable in contemporary haute cuisine: sustainable, seasonal, ethically sound, seriously playful, and full of technique. Once he reopened Cavatina with its new tasting menu at the end of 2020, streams of culinary pilgrims started heading to South Goa. An insistent buzz began to grow: Chef Martins is pushing the envelope of excellence, and serving the best and most interesting modern restaurant food in India. Few people can relate to how that feels, and that short list is headed by chef Thomas Zacharias, whose Bombay Canteen reigned decisively for some time as the consensus number one in India. Having moved on to found The Locavore—a new media enterprise “committed to doing good through food”—he told me Martins has his priorities right: “In high-end dining in India, there is this obsession with mimicking other parts of the world. What a lot of great chefs seem to be missing is the culinary wealth locked away in their own country. Chef Avinash is emotionally invested in the stories he’s trying to tell on the plate, and it is a real treat to see the vigour and enthusiasm with which he talks about a particular tradition that’s practically lost, or an ingredient that is barely cooked anymore.” That unbridled passion is front and centre at Cavatina, where the tasting menu doubles down on the cherished flavours of Goan home-cooking: “kalchi kodi” (thickened day-old “yesterday’s curry”), “tambdi bhaji” (red amaranth), and mango “miskut” pickle. These are already the foundations of deeply satisfying soul food, but Martins riffs from there in unexpected ways that surprise and delight in equal measure. The traditional “xec xec” (a sumptuous Goan crab curry) is reinvented as a bisque, roundels of beef are encrusted in the beloved “girem mirem” spice mix, and the cheesecake is made with old-fashioned coconut jaggery. Martins told the journalist Mini Ribeiro that his mind was already made up to go local, but after COVID-19 curfews were lifted, “I stepped out and met the farmers and began buying from them [directly]. From one community of farmers and local fishermen, artisans, toddy tappers, and coconut-pluckers, I got connected to others, and today there are almost 300 of them in my network.” No other chef in India has developed anything like this intricate web of producers. It’s one big reason Martins is hailed as a beacon for the future of fine dining in India. With remarkable chutzpah, he created an appreciable advantage that none of his urban competitors can challenge. They may have similar ethics—and even talent—but they don’t work adjacent to the abundant South Goa coastline, surrounded by traditional farming communities, in the lap of the boundlessly bountiful Western Ghats. An additional X factor in the spectacularly globalized cozinha de Goa itself: the traditional foods of India’s smallest state are kaleidoscopically diverse, with influences and ingredients from Africa, South East Asia, Europe, and Brazil. “THE MORE I SEE the best in the world, it keeps getting more obvious we’ve always been on the right track in Goa,” said the late chef Floyd Cardoz in his last interview with me in 2020, just days before he contracted an early—and tragically fatal—case of the coronavirus. Thirty years earlier, he had been the first to take the flavours of India (with an emphasis on his Goan roots and Bandra upbringing) into the most rarefied precincts of the Western restaurant universe, first with the New York City landmark Lespinasse—as a sous chef under Gray Kunz—and then Tabla, where he laid the foundation for modern Indian food. In his foreword to Cardoz’s excellent 2006 *One Spice, Two Spice* (William Morrow), the restaurateur Danny Meyer—who later hit the jackpot with Shake Shack—recalls “an earnest young cook” who “prepared an eye-opening, palate-bending tasting that blew our socks off” in an audition that led to founding Tabla. In his own introduction, Cardoz muses perceptively: “My way of thinking about food—about everything really—was influenced by different heritages, different customs that stretch around the world. What’s known in the West as fusion food—different cultures together on a plate—started for me in the cradle, because fusion was, quite simply, a way of life for our family.” Their restaurant emerged to explosive success, but Tabla eventually closed in 2010 (it had run for 12 years) with Meyer hinting the India emphasis was to blame. Looking back, it’s clear Cardoz was just ahead of his time. American palates were simply unprepared for what he was offering. It was only several years later, with his fabulously productive groove restored at the Bombay Canteen, that the obvious finally sunk in. It was never going to happen in New York, because the most sophisticated modern Indian food will—in fact, must—always be served in India to clients who have more than a clue. It takes everything coming together on and off the plate, which is quite rare. One place it is happening is Goa. “AVINASH IS DOING SOMETHING unique, but it is in the context of Goa,” says Vikram Doctor—in my opinion the finest food writer in India. “I can’t think of another place in India that offers this mix of urban, semi-urban, and rural environments, all in close proximity to each other, and also access to highly cosmopolitan customers. Nowhere else has this combination of farmers willing to try higher-end production, and the clientele willing to pay for food using it. There’s no reason why others can’t try to do it—and they really aren’t, anywhere in the country—so that’s very much to his credit.” Doctor says, “I love that Avinash offers really good options for the increasing numbers of diners who want vegetarian or vegan choices, which helps push his menu further towards responsible and sustainable choices. This is really rather unusual among most local chefs, who are partly driven by demands from tourists who equate Goa with meat-eating, and partly from buying into the myth of Goans as meat- rather than fish-focused, and perhaps also from a rather macho attitude that elevates meat-eating as ideal. I would certainly like to hope that chefs like Avinash are the future of Indian food.” That flip of the switch is already happening: Cavatina has rocketed to renown, and its July “pop-up” at The Lodhi brought the best of South Goa to New Delhi, cheek by jowl with Indian Accent. It’s an astonishing juxtaposition, underlining this improbable fact: In just the two fleeting years since he posted that first hesitant video from under the mango trees, Avinash Martins has become the hottest chef in the country. IT WOULD BE HARD to imagine something like this could ever have happened in Benaulim, except for this even more unlikely twist: Five minutes down the road is Tesouro, another brilliant pandemic-time experiment that came from nowhere earlier this year to rank fourth amongst Asia’s 50 Best Bars. That’s by far the highest any bar from India has ever achieved, from the brand-new consensus best in the country (late last year, it debuted at the top of the 30 Best Bars India list). It’s quite something to go from Cavatina to Tesouro on an extended evening in Benaulim, in the magnificent sweep of Salcete coastline that comprises the second-longest beach in India. There are still coconut groves and intact rice paddies, but uncomfortably crowded by haphazard construction in all directions. Some village character remains, with its traditional lore of fighting bulls and indigenous eccentrics. But there’s nothing quaint about either of these two seriously professional local institutions, where you are transported to the comforting hum of global best practices, expert systems, and superb service. In the case of Tesouro, especially, you could easily mistake it for London or Hong Kong or Floyd Cardoz’s beloved Manhattan, except for what’s in your glass. It’s surely the only glamorous bar in the world which devotes its first page to feni. That’s the final piece of this puzzle, and the third killer app coming out of South Goa at full speed, with every promise to conquer the world. “It was always obvious to me that our heritage is absolutely as good as it gets,” says Hansel Vaz, the charismatic 39-year-old entrepreneur whose younger brother Donovan is the majority partner at Tesouro, along with hospitality veterans Arijit Bose and Pankaj Balachandran. Just over a decade ago, while working as a geologist in New Zealand, he witnessed the meteoric global rise of mezcal—the fiery Mexican alcohol distilled in small batches—and recognized it held out huge potential for feni, the talismanic Goan drink made the same way from both cashew fruit and coconut palm toddy. His family had been in the alcohol retail business for over 100 years, but returning home to Goa to make and bottle “Cazulo Premium Feni” plunged him into turbulent waters—this traditional industry is ruled by arcane, age-old legislation and community practices, which took years of perseverance to penetrate. TESOURO AND CAVATINA are pandemic-time breakthroughs, but Vaz’s epiphany came earlier, after he was felled by a devastating heart attack at the Panaji Carnival party in 2018 (where he had just debuted his now-famous signature jambul-feni cocktail). Medical attention was prompt, but he remained clinically dead for 18 minutes. Astonishingly, after three attempts at revival, he says, “I came back charged up, with an unforgettable vision that was already fully formed in my mind.” Vaz started sketching while still on his hospital bed, and immediately after he got back on his feet, made everything come to life: a custom-built cellar lined with antique garrafões (outsize hand-blown bottles from Europe that were used in Goa in the 19th and early 20th centuries), located next to the last operational old-school feni distillery—no electricity, no metal, just the purest distillation process possible. The premium alcohol universe was agog from day one, and that level of recognition shows no sign of abating once it opened to the public. For just one example, the legendary Kayama San—“the greatest bartender of Japan”, whose Bar Benfiddich shows up at the top of every list of the world’s best—travelled from Tokyo to Goa this July just to spend time learning about feni at Fazenda Cazulo. “No matter how experienced they are, everyone is still blown away by what we do here,” says Vaz, an impassioned aficionado of the traditional systems governing what he calls the “community manufacturing” of feni in Goa. By law, the right to collect cashew produce—even from your trees at home—is auctioned in zones: one bidder for the fruit, and the other for nuts. The fruit is picked up fully ripe only from the ground—the first step of fermentation for this sourdough of spirits—and taken to be distilled in pre-industrial clay stills over firewood. At Fazenda Cazulo, I was shown a little bamboo claw used to pick up fruit where the maker had gone to the extent of using a porcupine quill instead of a nail, because it is the most natural option. All this may seem like an anachronism in the 21st century, but Vaz believes it constitutes the best advertisement for an inevitable leap up the global value chain: “The boom in single malts prepared people for spice, and now mezcals have made them accustomed to texture, but feni has both.” There is one final hurdle: the self-loathing directed at “desi daru”—Vaz tells me the newest celebrity-owned restaurant in Panjim told him they wouldn’t even open a bottle of feni because “it will make the whole room smell”—but that’s precisely why Fazenda Cazulo is so important, with its emphasis on brilliant cocktail pairings with food that invokes terroir, that is shared in gorgeous natural surroundings including the one-of-a-kind “table in the water” shin-deep in the property’s perennial spring. Everyone who goes loves every minute. There’s nothing remotely like it anywhere else in India. HOW DID ALL THIS happen in what seems like the blink of an eye in one strip of South Goa? Lightning supposedly never strikes twice in the same place, but hasn’t it happened here three times in rapid succession? Part of the answer surely derives from the individual drive and determination of Avinash Martins and the Vaz brothers—who all studied together at the century-old Loyola High School in the Salcete capital of Margao—but there’s also the singular context of India’s smallest state in 2022, where droves of moneyed urbanites have descended to wait out the pandemic, with many putting down more permanent roots. They have fuelled an unseemly boom with complicated ramifications: rampant illegalities, environmental destruction, and severe demographic displacement, as native Goans are now decidedly in the minority in their own homeland. To get some up-to-the-minute perspective earlier this year in mid-July, I motored down south from my home in Miramar—it’s on the Mandovi riverfront of Panjim—to pick up the eminent Konkani writer Damodar Mauzo from Majorda, just up the coastal road from Benaulim, and take him for lunch to Cavatina. It was an exceptionally moody, overcast monsoon morning and I enjoyed most of the ride through the flourishing green, except for long sections where the highways are being controversially massively expanded, with devastating effects on some of the most fertile, ancient, and exquisitely beautiful agricultural lands in the entire Konkan. For older Goans like me (I was born in 1968) these kinds of scenes inevitably invoke brooding, or what the Portuguese call saudade, but those feelings rapidly lifted across the table from Mauzo. The 78-year-old littérateur is the winner of the Jnanpith Award 2022—accurately described as India’s own Nobel Prize for Literature—but wears his greatness with immense grace and good humour. If there is anyone who knows what it takes to draw deep from the wellsprings of Goan culture, and celebrate its many-layered identity at the highest standard, it is the author of *Karmelin *(1981), *Teresa’s Man and Other Stories From Goa* (2014), and *The Wait and Other Stories* (2022). Chef Martins told Mauzo and me about belonging to one of those typical South Goan families “on the ship”, with most male role models working as crew on international cruise liners. He tried to follow his father and uncle, but baulked and came ashore, and chose food, which is when “I became the black sheep. Other than my parents, even my own relatives stopped talking to me.” That situation didn’t change much despite doing well at hotel management school in Ooty, where he was the only student out of 150 to be selected for training at the Oberoi Centre of Learning and Development. Even after moving back to Goa to start Cavatina with Tiz Lygdoh—“She is more than just my wife; we are soul mates”—there was nay-saying and negativity about his choice to live and work near home in Salcete, instead of crossing the Zuari to the overheated north. All this is intimate terrain for Mauzo, whose life and literature are famously steeped in the experience of serving his community from his ancestral general store by the village crossroads. He listened closely to the concept behind the tasting menu—it is accompanied by postcards highlighting the producers of the ingredients—and I watched his face fill with emotion when Martins described a course paying tribute to the genius bakers of Majorda. We feasted and marvelled at the richness and power of the story of Salcete that unfolded on our plates and palates. My friend rose to embrace Martins. “We are proud of you, Avinash,” he said. No more words were necessary. _______________________________ https://www.gqindia.com/live-well/content/gqs-ultimate-goa-hype-list-20-of-the-best-iconic-establishments-you-must-visit-for-an-ultimate-goa-experience Beyond the blitz of public relations hoopla about eating and drinking in Goa, where new restaurants and bars keep opening and closing with dizzying speed, there’s an indisputable base of excellence as good as it gets anywhere. Some of these iconic establishments are well known around the country, and even host pop-ups in other cities. Many others—often by choice—have remained more under the radar. Here are 20 of the very best. *Aayi’s* is an immersive experience of rare quality. Shubra Shankhwalker will go to the market and pick up ingredients (she prefers groups of four or more) to prepare an extensive multi-course meal of ultra-fresh, hyperlocal specialities from the traditional repertoire of her ancestral community—the Saraswat Brahmins—to be served at her family farmhouse in North Goa. *Bombil *makes the best, most inspired fish thalis of the moment, which is an outstanding achievement considering that Goa is obsessed with them. It’s also a charming venue, although now somewhat alarmingly thronged, which means you should count on dawdling outside for a bit before getting a table. Take the time, this place is worth it. *Brown Koji Boy* is based on Prachet Sancheti’s constant experiments with fermentation, which produces a range of miso, tamari, pastes, oils, and even a “vegan XO sauce”, that have become wildly popular with chefs around the country, and are all available for order from his website. *Casa Museu Figueiredo* offers one of the most extraordinary experiences imaginable: an opulent sit-down meal of Luso-Indian specialities, served in the spectacular formal dining room of the most intact palazzo from the heyday of Goa’s feudal grandees. It’s a rare privilege in every way, with amazing food to match every other aspect of the experience. *Cream Choc* used to be entirely worth the ride out to its sole North Goa location, but now its unbeatable gelatos are available in several different locations, with rumoured plans to go nationwide next. If so, lucky for the rest of the country, because this uncompromisingly dense, super-creamy Italian-style ice cream is easily the best in the country. *For the Record* is the definition of unique: the country’s pioneering vinyl bar, where great LPs go along with bespoke audiophile equipment, exquisite handmade cocktails made with highly seasonal local ingredients, and stunning experimental food that riffs on different kinds of fermentation (do not miss the black garlic chocolate tart). *Goa Brewing Company* hosts arts exhibitions, and it’s fun to see how a brewery works, but you should visit especially to sample its playful, clever, and thoughtful small-batch concoctions: trappist ale laced with coconut jaggery, a French-styled farmhouse saison matured on local pineapples, and the robust People’s Lager made with the local red rice. *Izumi Assagao* is everything that everyone loves about the Bandra original (which is in every shortlist of the best restaurants in India) but exponentially better in this new Goa location, under spreading shade trees next to a swimming pool, alongside an attractive bar that aims to be one of the best in the country in its own right. *Larder & Folk* has come from nowhere to catapult to national attention during the past two years, after the highly trained chef Priyanka Sardessai (she studied at the Culinary Institute of America, then worked for the legendary chef Daniel Bouloud in New York) started making unbelievably delicious babkas to order, followed by equally impossibly good bánh mì sandwiches. You can get both, plus so much more, at her new outlet, and it’s worth travelling to Goa just to try her tiramisu doughnuts. *Makutsu* defines boutique—a tiny dining space that barely seats a dozen, specializing in food that’s painstakingly grilled yakitori-style (on tiny wooden skewers, over charcoal in a hibachi) and layered with umami bombs like kombu salt, miso chili, and togarashi butter. This is the place to try chicken heart, but don’t miss the vegetable options, especially—believe it or not—the broccoli. *Miguel’s* strives to deliver modern restaurant food in premises that have been quirkily decorated in tribute to classic Art Deco. What’s more, it mostly delivers on that effort, with small bites riffing on South Indian foods and flavours, satisfying mains (try the pan seared giant sea perch—a.k.a. chonak—with kokum reduction and roasted cashew curry), and handmade cocktails of unusual quality. *Miski Community Bar* keeps alight the glory days of Old Panjim from its charming kerbside corner location in São Tomé—the first of five “wards” spilling into each other to constitute the vaunted Latin Quarter—where two scions of the city have tried to reconstitute the atmosphere of their childhood, with good friends enjoying great food and drinks in convivial company. *MumMai* is pure nostalgia: excellent home-cooking and unbeatable value for money. Everything is very good, but the killer app is the best ros omelette in the state. Many places that serve this most beloved Goan street food are justifiably famous for the curry (most often chicken) element, but chef Elvis Victor rocks the eggs better than anyone, and doubles down by offering multiple options as accompaniment: Try the sorpotel. *On the Go* is undoubtedly the only Peruvian café in the country, run with immense passion and flair by Marco Crisanto. There are many specialities here that you can get nowhere else: the causa rellena potato casseroles, home-cured ham butifarra sandwiches, and lush alfajores biscuits. Don’t miss the “suspiros a la limeña” (sighs of the lady from Lima), an especially decadent dessert. *Padaria Prazeres* shot to fame for their pastéis de nata, the iconic little custard tarts from Portugal that have conquered the world in the past two decades. This wonderfully professional little bakery—it’s run by an attractive young couple, Ralph and Stacy Prazeres—does make them extremely well, but also much more, including first-rate multigrain baguettes, ciabatta, and poppy-seed bagels. *Raki* is not uncomplicated: its ownership is the political family that currently dominates Panjim. But it also cannot be denied that what they have put together is quite special: consistently decent Middle Eastern fare presented very well, in a truly beautiful location atop one of the newest tall buildings near Miramar beach, with the entire sweep of Aguada Bay just below. *Schandis* came about because Hossein and Hediyeh Haghighatgoo moved to Goa, in order to pursue a different life from what they were experiencing in the Iranian expatriate community of Frankfurt in Germany. This outstandingly diligent young couple decided to fill the void for authentic Persian food in India and serve dishes exactly like you would find in Tehran. Pro tip: Call the day ahead and splurge on booking the raan. *Smoke Barbeque* is one of a kind in every possible way, starting with its owner, the “grilled meats” obsessive Geoff Vrolijk (he is originally Canadian) who has custom-built and fine-tuned some extraordinary contraptions to make the best barbecue in India by a considerable margin. The ribs are absolutely amazing, but don’t miss the burnt ends—like caramel popcorn. *Swiss Happy Cow Cheese* has been sold in North Goa supermarkets for years, but its entire range of superb artisanal cheeses is reliably available at the spotless little headquarters in Siolim, where Barbara Schwarzfischer—a master cheesemaker from Switzerland—makes outstanding Camembert and Parmesan, amidst many other surprises. *Vida* springs from four generations in the restaurant business from the family behind Café Tato, the 100-year-old Panjim landmark. This new venture, in highly impressive premises near the South Goa capital of Margao, digs deep into the Goan repertoire to come up with food that isn’t usually available to outsiders: crumb-fried breadfruit, sweet-potato neurio pasties, and even pez, the rice kanji revered as a fortifying cure-all.