#blahvsfood : Mahe, Anjuna and the need to take Indian food forward

November 07, 2020

#blahvsfood : Mahe, Anjuna and the need to take Indian food forward

I have been increasingly frustrated by the lack of courage and progressive thinking in the Indian food scene. More and more I feel the restaurants I want to really highlight are not the ones that just do tasty food but who are contributing to the growth and evolution of India’s food scene. Restaurants and chefs that demonstrate creativity, courage and intellectual depth. Who are able to combine that with actual skill and technique, and create food with flavour and food with a story. Of course that means that some of them will not give you the consistency that you seek, sometimes even within a meal. But to me that doesn’t matter so much. As long as chef goes down this path with honesty, I know the end result can only be good for Indian food.

One of the few restaurants that I really feel is doing stuff that is fresh and new and executing it well is Mahe in Goa. The chef Sandeep Sreedharan is not a trained chef. In his previous life he was a management consultant. You wouldn’t realise it though when you eat his food at Mahe Goa.

Kokum and triphal cured warm mackerel,
pickles and kokum cream

He pushes the envelope and creates new flavours and combinations, but the food is never unmoored from its roots. Sometimes those roots are his own life and origins and the state of Kerala. At other times it’s the food he finds in the market. I love the use of fish like mackerel rather than things like kingfish or pomfret. Or how he takes a staple of Malayalee food like tapioca to create Indian dishes that are modern in terms of thought and interpretation and expression rather than as a label or a marketing gimmick. I also love it when a chef knows when a dish needs to be left alone with no messing around with the taste. The Kerala beef fry at Mahe for example uses the undercut so you get a higher quality of meat. But the cooking itself stays true to what you would find in a toddy shop in Allepay.

Kerala Beef Fry

The drinks are superb with cocktails prepared by the guys at Spiffy Dapper in Singapore. The seriousness of thought is demonstrated in things like the ice programme. Dense, clear cubes that don’t melt quickly and mess with the consistency and flavour of the drinks.

Mahe doesn’t have a PR person so it doesn’t get the hype and attention it should. But I urge anyone who is serious about food to go eat there. It’s one of the places that is showing us a path forward for Indian food.

We ate: