I went back to Goa, after nearly 10 years to get the scare of my life. I used to be a Goa regular in the 90s, quite veritably in those days, I nearly felt Goan myself. My mentor and boss in advertising, Sylvester daCunha came from purebred Portuguese-Goan lineage. He spoke Portuguese better than Konkani, wore suits, and had a sprawling 500-year-old home in Arpora Village in Goa.
And when he and I travelled in Goa, we lived like natives on holiday. Our days were blurred with Gin and Tonics soaking in, excessive amounts of heat, hootch and Humann (fish curry). The clammy evenings were a hunt for clams, cafreal and chouriço, and the dark nights black with Johnny Walker.
Baga beach was a short drive away and we would emerge in the afternoon from his cavernous casa in this thickly forested village, stumbling past the old whitewashed church, our linen shirt buttons open till our navels, our chests tawny in the dog days of summer and our bottle of Gordons hidden in our shorts.
Baga in those days was a quiet and desolate. It was a short drive or a long walk-through paddy fields and coconut palmed roads along the river, over a small bridge. The red soil making our toes look like fish-fingers. St Antony’s Bar was at the end of the beach just before the sea snaked inland and turned into the Arpora river.
We’d sit in the shade, drink our own booze, order stuffed crabs, rawa fried prawns, chouriço – pav and prawn curry rice and watch the sun go down. From Baga, Calangute seemed like it was a whole village away and Candolim a much further away parish. Along the way there were a few shops that sold kitsch, a few cafes, hotels and restaurants. That’s it.
This time, I couldn’t recognise anything. Hell, I couldn’t even recognise the Mandovi Bridge, leave alone identify the Porvorim turning to Saligao and Calangute. The whole Baga-Calangute-Candolim stretch had turned into exuberant wasteland of vinyl and vulgarity. There was construction everywhere, shops, emporiums, mini malls, stalls all selling absolutely useless stuff that is obsessive Indian tourist bait.
There must have been restaurants, cafés, and food stalls, every few metres, their frontages embellished with neon and acrylic signs with over-saturated photo-shopped images of food.
Even the laterite walls of the few remaining old Goan homes were obscured with glaring, garish and gaudy vinyl boards emblazoned with incongruous words like PURE VEG, UDIPI, DHABA, BIRYANI, TANDOORI, CHAAT, BHEL PURI. The streets and beaches strewn with plastic bottles, plastic bags, empty beer cans, paper plates and people. People everywhere.
Men without muscle or bicep wearing tight singlets and women in velvet and bling. A quick recce through the maze of humanity and Poly-vinyl-chloride sheets, I realised I was getting no Goan food here in Goa. I’d positively get an idli, vada, sambhar, dhokla, khandvi, and thepla but definitely no, vindaloo, sorpotel, balchão or rechado. So I decide to flee.
Someone had mentioned Bhatti Village, a famous mom and pop eatery in Nerul Village in North Goa’s Bardez taluka. Parts of Nerul are still quiet and the Nerul River runs through the village as backwaters. I headed straight into the arms of Merciana and Patrick D’souza who run this small tavern with their son Roystern. The café is in an old Goan home and concealed in the surroundings.
Besides the walls which are adorned with old feni casks and jars full of fermenting vinegar, Bhatti Village has a menu of some wonderful home-style Goan Christian delicacies. I decided to skip the vindaloo, cafreal, ambotik and sorpotel and asked Patrick to recommend some fish, pork and coconut curry.
While I sipped a glass of fresh Urak (the first distillation of the cashew apple) with Limca, garnished with a slice of lime and a green chilly, crispy fried White Bait came to the table. White Bait is a small, thin, fish hardly two inches in length which is crisply rava fried. It has a very fine or no bone at all, so you can crunch on it without any worry. It’s a great accompaniment with drinks, an inevitability for me in Goa.
Then came “gabholi” that’s fish roe or eggs of fish, marinated in spices and pan fried. It’s got a crumbly consistency and a deliciously fishy taste. I asked for curry and I got a curry, but for me it was an out of the ordinary curry. Samaranchi Kodi is a dark yellow coconut curry made with dry shrimp.
I love dry shrimp in any form so I was really pleased. The dry shrimp is cooked with the flesh of raw mango, so it has an exuberant sourness that goes so well with the spices, coconut milk and deeply fishy, salty and slightly sweet taste of dried shrimp. The way to eat the Samarachi Kodi is with fat red Goan rice and your fingers. And the piece de resistance was a pork curry that I had never tasted in my life.
Less complicated and much simpler than the robust and complex vindaloo, the Pork Bendisol was indeed a revelation to me. It’s cooked with minimal spices, full pods of garlic, tonnes of kokum, whole red chillies and onion. This succulent curry with sharp distinctly identifiable favours has a light thin sauce, which when mopped up with either sannas (toddy fermented rice bread) or preferably Poi (Goan bread) for me was the finest pork I had eaten in a while.
After all the disappointment, this was my final gratification. After all, how could Goa ever let me down?
Kunal Vijayakar is a food writer based in Mumbai. He tweets @kunalvijayakar and can be followed on Instagram @kunalvijayakar. His YouTube channel is called Khaane Mein Kya Hai. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the stand of this publication.
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