https://www.gqindia.com/content/goas-buzziest-restaurants-praca-prazeres-and-larder-folk-traverse-the-european-continent-for-inspiration
Just over a year ago, I found Ralph Prazeres uncharacteristically pensive behind the counter of his lively bakery-café near my home in Panjim, one of the post-pandemic runaway successes that define Goa’s increasingly merited hype as the food capital of the country. Padaria Prazeres (padaria means bakery in Portuguese) rocketed to attention immediately after opening in 2021 for its superb pastéis de nata— traditional custard tarts from Lisbon that have become an unstoppable global trend—and has kept on winning prizes and honours ever since. Still, it was obviously not enough for this Cordon Bleu–trained expert with hard-earned experience in the kitchens of some of the world’s best restaurants, and on that day he finally confessed what was on his mind: Salade Niçoise. It was such an odd, unlikely revelation that an inadvertent grin spread across my face until I realized the intense 32-year-old was being serious. He told me, “I need to start cooking my food, which is the French classics made exactly how they are meant to be. There is no one else doing it in India, but it’s what I’m going to do.” Bemused by this bold statement of purpose, I ventured to ask which dishes he had in mind that weren’t being properly represented anywhere in this vast country, and that’s when the young chef’s eyes lit up with excitement talking about the iconic 19th-century salad from the Côte d’Azur—Nice is the largest city in the French Riviera other than the ancient port of Marseilles—along with other decidedly old-school fare from the golden age of European gastronomy. His passion struck me as charming, but also distinctly eccentric—this millennial Indian so hung up on cooking what even the French consider old-fashioned—and I returned home unconvinced his quirky dream would ever come true. That, of course, was my very big mistake, because Prazeres proceeded to accomplish exactly what he intended, and opened up an elegant, astonishingly accomplished little shrine to French cooking in an ingeniously restored old house in São Tomé, one of the pocket-sized heritage neighbourhoods spilling into each other along the Rio de Ourém (the “river of gold” mangrove-lined creek at the entrance to Goa’s pocket-sized capital). From the moment I entered Praça Prazeres soon after it opened, it was obvious there is indeed nothing like this understated but unlimitedly ambitious restaurant anywhere else in the country, and that was even before his Salade Niçoise made its first appearance on my table. It was an epiphany in a bowl—shockingly good and so unbelievably addictive that I literally woke up the next morning craving more. That is when it finally sunk in what had made the young chef so wistful all those months ago, and every meal I have enjoyed at his hands after that has only confirmed he is the real deal. Make no mistake, this is an instant culinary landmark of huge significance, and anyone who cares about truly great restaurant food in India needs to check out what this gifted maestro is capable of. To be sure, Praça Prazeres poses any number of challenges to conventional wisdom in our hype-driven 21st-century restaurant landscape, along with what passes for rankings of the very best in the country. This new establishment is rooted in one of the most resolutely carnivorous regions of the country, and does serve beef, fish and chicken, but its most revelatory dishes turned out to be runner beans with cauliflower purée, cubes of beetroot with goat’s cheese, charred cabbage set off by crispy chickpeas, and, above all else, that killer Salade Niçoise (which contains tuna and anchovies). Everything is meticulously technique-driven French cooking without any pandering to “the Indian palate” that usually characterizes—and ruins—most “continental” restaurants in this part of the world. Also markedly unusual is the service: warm and attentive but never obsequious, with the tone set eye-to-eye from the open kitchen out of which Prazeres constantly pops out to meet and greet, with the front of the house tightly controlled by his wife Stacy Gracias. All this is unconventional in India, but in many ways, it represents the platonic ideal of modern restaurant culture in the West, as it developed out of 19th-century France, and was substantially shaped by the famous Michelin Guide books, which began to become all-important in the wake of World War I just over 100 years ago. The brainchild of tire company founders André and Édouard Michelin—the brothers’ idea was to encourage motorists to drive further thus generating more demand for their products—has become an all-powerful juggernaut, with perniciously influential ratings of restaurants in almost 40 countries from Japan to Brazil, but it began with purer intentions and this lastingly compelling and effective set of criteria to compare like to like: quality of products, demonstrated mastery of flavour and techniques, value for money and consistency between visits, but above all “the personality of the chef represented in the dining experience”. Those elemental yardsticks continue to make perfect sense, but there is no doubt social media and changing generational preoccupations have skewed the 21st-century dining experience towards smoke and mirrors and non-stop spectacle. It is equally true everywhere in the world from Manhattan to Mumbai: Today’s celebrated restaurants tend heavily to tasting menus and Instagram-friendly interiors, where people-watching is as important as eating, and you wind up paying just as much for the photo-op as for what’s on your plate. This is an undeniable reality of our times, and it’s why it has yet to be seen whether Ralph Prazeres can be as successful as he genuinely merits because it is unclear whether the clientele to appreciate his cooking even exists in any substantial measure in this country. After all, the locality may be endlessly atmospheric and thronged all day with eager tourists, but São Tomé is definitely not Saint-Tropez, and it’s going to be an uphill challenge to get young Indians excited about Salade Niçoise. Will it ever happen? For sure, that possibility cannot be dismissed altogether because the light bulb did go on for me many years ago, and the same thing happened for Prazeres three decades later. In my case, it was while studying at the venerable Cours de civilisation française de la Sorbonne in Paris in 1991, where my chambre de bonne (the “maid’s chambers” often occupied by semi-indigent students like me) was just around the corner from Au Pied de Fouet, an old and tiny brasserie filled with elderly civil servants from the government offices throughout the 7th arrondissement. I was just 23, with an extremely limited budget, but in those days it was enough for a couple of prix fixe dinners every week, where I would test my language skills—they never went past very basic—while the formidable matron of the house instructed me about what to eat. It was an unforgettable education in refinement, and the pleasures of dining in courses, with the purpose of replenishing both body and soul. All of that is integral to gastronomy—the term comes from ancient Greek—the highly evolved philosophy of the table that was elevated most memorably by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the 19th-century bon vivant and author of the most famous and influential food book of all time, the utterly lovely 1825 *The Physiology of Taste*, which popularized the concept of “gourmet” and coined vivid aphorisms like “Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you what you are” and “Animals feed themselves; men eat; but only wise men know the art of eating.” I got my first copy in translation by the great American food writer MFK Fisher all those years ago in Paris—another crucial recommendation by the grand old lady of Au Pied de Fouet—and was immediately hooked by its lofty stream of logic: “Gastronomy is the knowledge and understanding of all that relates to man as he eats. Its purpose is to ensure the conservation of men, using the best food possible” and “It is gastronomy which so studies men and things that everything worth being known is carried from one country to another, so that an intelligently planned feast is like a summing-up of the whole world, where each part is represented by its envoys.” There is a direct line from Brillat-Savarin and Marie-Antoine “Antonin” Carême—the roughly contemporaneous chef who first described the “mother sauces” of French cooking—to the great modernizer Auguste Escoffier, who codified their preparation, and together they laid out the gold standard of what became known as haute cuisine everywhere in the world throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. This too extended from Manhattan to Mumbai, wherever the well-heeled congregated to eat. Just check out what was consumed at the historic banquet “at the stroke of the midnight hour” at the Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay on 14 August 1947: consommé, velouté d’amandes, paupiette de saumon, poulard souffé and vacherin de pêches. And here is an interesting twist that connects back directly to Ralph Prazeres: the chefs who prepared that first Independence Day banquet were all from Goa, led by the imposing Miguel Arcanjo “Chef Masci” Mascarenhas. This is no accident, and that rich cultural history is another big reason that Praça Prazeres fits so seamlessly in its heritage neighbourhood. It is because French cooking has been in vogue in Panjim for at least 200 years, following an identical trend in Lisbon (the only cookbook written in Portugal in the entire 18th century was compiled by Lucas Rigaud, a French chef at the royal court). The delicacies he found on the tables of Goa amazed the swashbuckling Victorian adventurer-author Richard Burton when he sailed from Sindh to Panjim, as he reports in his entertaining 1851 debut *Goa, and the Blue Mountains; or, Six Months of Sick Leave*: “An entertainment at the house of a Goanese [sic] noble presents a curious contrast to the semi-barbarous magnificence of our Anglo-Indian ‘doings’. In one as much money as possible is lavished in the worst way imaginable; the other makes all the display which taste, economy, and regard for effect combined produce. ...The dinner parties resemble the other entertainments in economy and taste.... [And] the cookery is all in the modified French style common to the South of Europe.” All this is crucial context. As the result of complicated accidents of history, and unlike anything that happened in any other colony, many of the Goans whom Burton encountered in 1840s Panjim possessed full citizenship and an unprecedented parity of legal rights that didn’t happen for other Indians for another full century. The inveterate imperialist keeps on bemoaning this unfamiliar situation throughout his biliously racist but ultimately hilarious book: “No wonder that the black Indo-Portuguese is an utter radical; he has gained much by Constitution, the “dwarfish demon” which sets everybody by the ears at Goa. Hence it is that he will take the first opportunity in conversation with a foreigner to extol Lusitanian liberty to the skies, abuse English tyranny over, and insolence to, their unhappy Indian subjects.... [Because] equality allows them to indulge in a favourite independence of manner utterly at variance with our Anglo-Indian notions concerning the proper demeanour of a native towards a European.” What does this have to do with Praça Prazeres in São Tomé? It is the foundation of everything because it is precisely the unique cultural wherewithal Burton describes that makes the difference between this new restaurant compared with every other comparable establishment in the country. Here, the young chef is not reproducing something he’s learned in order to target the demands of any established clientele. Instead, this food—and the restaurant itself—represents who he is. The difference is palpable and shows with every bite. It isn’t cooking by the numbers, but exactly what those ubiquitous Michelin Guides purport to prize above all: the expression of the chef’s identity in the dining experience. The first time I ate there it took me straight back to Au Pied de Fouet, and each visit thereafter has only further convinced me we’re witnessing the emergence of an impressively deft, assured and adventuresome new culinary voice. “I want to be in the top 10 in Asia,” says Ralph Prazeres in a moment of calm before the service challenges on a recent evening, “and if Michelin comes to India, of course, I want that star.” These are goals he has been systematically working towards throughout his adult life, after growing up in a family tradition of hotels and restaurants (his father is one of India’s smallest state’s hospitality pioneers), and the hard grind of rigorous training: Ecole Hoteliere Lavasa and Le Cordon Bleu London, followed by long hours “making his bones” in the Rosewood Hotel kitchen under chef Jérôme Voltat (“That’s where I became steeped in refined French techniques”) and the award-winning Clos Maggiore in Covent Garden. Then came an eye-opening stage at Noma in Copenhagen, the consensus best restaurant in the world—“I learned about consistency here”—and another indispensable stint at St John, the influential London restaurant often ranked the best in Britain, where “it’s all about the importance of simplicity: nose-to-tail, pan and fire”. This level of first-rate training and experience is comparatively new in the Indian restaurant universe—the likes of Chef Masci rose through the ranks from washing dishes and plucking chickens— but they’re increasingly de rigueur amongst the most ambitious restaurants in the country, including some of those in Goa. In this regard, it’s fascinating to observe the uncannily symbiotic relationship between Praça Prazeres and Larder + Folk, the outlandishly excellent bakery and coffee shop just around the corner in São Tomé, where the identically aged Priyanka Sardessai—the two chefs actually attended nursery school together—also trained with the best, at the Culinary Institute of America and New York City landmarks Red Rooster and Café Boulud. There is another meaningful similarity: Both establishments have the chef’s partner up front handling customers and Siddharth Sumitran plays just as crucial a role as Stacy Gracias. Actually, it was Sumitran’s eye-catching designs for Larder + Folk that first caught my eye when Sardessai started up after the first COVID-19 lockdown was lifted in Goa. She was retailing babkas—the talismanic Jewish–New Yorker sweet braided bread— and then announced she would be making bánh mì sandwiches, the first time I ever heard of this fabulous French-Vietnamese street food specialty being made available in India. Every item was thoroughly delicious, and the Beatles-themed concept was irresistible—Can’t Bánh Mì Love. “I was going through major withdrawal about America all through lockdown,” says Sardessai, “and seriously craving what I couldn’t have from New York.” Her cooking delved deep into those cherished food memories, and she started making fried chicken sandwiches, drawing upon her restaurant training in Harlem under the path-breaking chef Marcus Samuelsson. The unyielding demand for this runaway hit has been the foundation of her success. “I was a very ADHD kid growing up,” says Sardessai—who was only diagnosed as such in adulthood—“and my parents were absolutely against my doing anything in food.” Her father and sister are lawyers, and while her mother was an established caterer she cautioned against entering this difficult and strenuous profession. But after studying commerce in Pune, the young chef-in-the-making decided to work at Tea Café, newly established by Vandana Naique, who herself returned to Goa after studying at the Culinary Institute of America and working for many years in New York: “That experience is what gave me the blueprint for what to do, and, eventually, when my parents came for my graduation it changed the way they looked at the industry, and realized how much cooking meant to me as well.” There is an uncanny congruence and flow between Praça Prazeres and Larder + Folk, which I have been relishing—to the admitted detriment of my already expansive waistline—throughout this new year. The latter is open in the day until 7 pm, which is exactly when the French cooking starts up in the former, and to go from a leisurely co ee-and-Berliner in one to dinner and drinks in the other has become one of the essential culinary circuits in the country. In fact, I have begun to think of the two young chefs as twinned virtuosos, whose genius is best understood and appreciated in connection with each other, like Picasso and Matisse—or Francis Newton Souza and Vasudeo Gaitonde, who also shared Goan roots and bold global ambitions that were backed up by sensational skills and capabilities. Like those exemplary artists who kick-started modernism in India, there are crucial differences between them: It feels like Prazeres cooks for an ideal international clientele, even if it may never show up around him, while Sardessai is on a quest to satisfy her equally unknowable innermost spirit. The wonderful news for all of us is we never have to choose.
