IS GOA THE CULINARY CAPITAL OF INDIA?

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Uncategorized September 20, 2025 , by Tara Narayan

AT last count it was estimated that there are 15,147 restaurants in Goa, out of which 8,331 are in the organized sector. In toto India’s restaurant industry is worth Rs 5.89 lakh crore, which equals 1.9% of India’s GDP, the hospitality industry is the second largest employer offering 86.5 lakh jobs…

QUITE a few people think Goa is the culinary capital of India with discerning foodies coming to Goa in search of food, which they may not find elsewhere in other Indian holiday destinations. Even Tourism Minister Rohan Khaunte said as much while addressing the recent National Restaurant Association of India (NRAI) grand meet of restaurateurs which took place Sept15-17, 2025. Tourists are beginning to see Goa beyond sun, sea and sand and come looking for fine dining which they may not find elsewhere in other holiday destinations.
The foodie industry in Goa is certainly thriving but the flip side is every now and again I meet somebody coming to Goa who think the best thing to do is to come to open a niche eatery — books and cultural cafeteria, pizzeria offering thick and thin wheat crust pizza, cakes, pastries, extraordinary ice-creams, just samosa or just sourdough croissants and loaves of bread and other foodie idea designed to catch the cosmopolitan palate…cuisines real or unreal but claiming to be niz Goankar, Middle Eastern, Lebanese, Nepali, Russian, Italian and what not and what not. International cuisines, welcome to Goa the paradise for eating out (although the irony is that every since Covid happened more and more folk prefer to order home with Swiggy ruling the roost of home deliveries and in fact, financing cloud kitchens too (whatever cloud kitchens are I still don’t know, just makeovers to earn big money quick, quick).

Alas, down Caranzalen street in Panjim where I’ve lived in various lowly or not so lowly rentals, I’ve seen at least half-a-dozen come lately foodie places open and shut down in a year and chances I’ve freely promoted some of them here in my more than 35 years old foodie column for all the good it has done them…and hell’s bell this happens all the time. I praise the best ginger cookies in town for Rs40 and the next time I go there it’s priced at Rs50 and similar adventures in pricing themselves out of the market or so to speak.
Funny or not funny I don’t understand why when a loaf of pau costs Rs5, a millet roti or chappati or phulka should cost Rs30 plus, plus? But to stay with the aforementioned hi fi restaurateurs meet do you know Goa is only .1% India in terms of land but it has an estimated 7,000 night clubs, annually we see an estimated crore of tourists seeking all kinds of pleasures of mind and body, heart and soul and now increasingly also during the monsoon season.
The hospitality industry in Goa is mindboggling from good, bad and sometimes ugly…but let’s not go into that here. Goa certainly has some iconic eateries and most of them were awarded at the NRAI event which saw at least 2,000 plus registrations, plus lots of sponsors naturally.
It was certainly interesting to catch a bit of the meet at what seems to have become Panjim’s favorite event place in the Taj Horizon at Dona Paula. The 2-day agenda had some interesting talks from crafting restaurants, eating experiences, raising the bar in marketing and presentation of both up market and not so upmarket popular snacks familiar and unfamiliar (many frightening take-offs on my favorite street foods like the humble batatwada, what happens to it when it turns into an industrially processed batatwada costing three times the street price)…are the hitherto niche micro-cuisines going mainstream? All this and much more.
FRANKLY, my friends I’m utterly against the obsessive industrializing of food from the standpoint of extending shelf life. You know as much me perhaps that generally speaking every enlightened human being today is chasing better health parameters and would like to at least avoid or boycott the plethora of industrialized foods in the marketplace. Sorry, I have to repeat ad nauseam, what we put in our mouth has a dramatic and melodramatic effect on the status of our health and more so as we grow old and older. Also, please agree with me here and in most urban homes today there is cancer and pharma companies and hospitals are running all the way to the bank – producing million dollar cures in drugs and bribing hospitals till the end of time.
For most of us are unable to change lifestyles quite simply because of inability to finance the infrastructure required in time enough to make for a happier difference. The good stuff is now machines are being invented to offer genuinely healthier or perceived healthier options in what you put in your mouth – air-fryers, for example have arrived big time and I’m told even the iconic Café Central is now “air-frying” its famous mushroom samosa so that they are no longer greasy to touch with the fingers. Something like that, we don’t take the heat factor into consideration – we know at high temperatures food nutrients basically become non-foods for promoting any health values.
How complicated and perverted our taste in eating to live have become and where do we start anew from scratch, when powerful economic forces conspires to make short work of life itself – who wants to cater to extending shelf life of homo sapiens? Not even those who still perceive themselves as human beings with cognitive faculties enough to understand good from bad.
No, that’s not true of course. Witness the huge leap in research and search going into finding the fountain of youth, it’s not like that great song Alan Jackson sings, “The older I get, the more I think, you only get a minute … it’s the people you love, not the money and stuff, that makes you rich…and if they found a fountain of youth, I wouldn’t drink a drop and that’s the truth…the older I get the better I am, knowing when to give and when to just not give a damn…” etcetera, some unforgettable lyrics here.
WHO wants to live, who wants to die, to live or die, to suffer or enjoy till doomsday, to love or shun love, what kind of babies to have; today there’re all these dilemmas and more grist for the mills of life grinding away so slowly or so quickly. Human life continues to be finite, not infinite, even if the prediction is that those wealthy enough chase stem cell therapies to live beyond a 100, for what purpose? What’s your contribution to the good life on earth, not the good life for the many at the bottom rungs struggling to stay alive honorably?
The story is that an evil cartel of millionaires, billionaires, trillionaires (MBTs) have hijacked the world and are rapidly putting it on the road to perdition…don’t we find this reflected in our social media of our times? The question now is what kind of a world are we being led into, by the time the governments of the world succeed in eliminating tuberculosis (oldest disease of malnutrition) or for that matter, cancer (most recent disease in epidemic context)?
The rich will always continue to live longer (unless someone kills them like they did Charlie Kirk recently in the US), the poor will live and die like flies — unless our ways of thinking change like Speedy Gonsalves to offer hope to the many to harvest a life worth living free from dirty air, dirty water, dirty food and dirty everything else including happiness till kingdom come! Think about all this my friends and don’t just think.
Making life simple and easy to live is not easy to do and in my book, you have to begin in the hell hole of the mind where we mould heart and soul, all manifesting on the body inside out and outside in, no? All this is has a bearing on what we put in our mouth morning, noon and night? Yes! That’s where it begins if you’re asking me.