Anand Bar and Seafood Restaurant, Anjuna

I’ve been looking for a great fish thali place for a while. Ever since I saw men in t shirts tighter than their chests and women in stilettos queuing up to get into Vinayak.

I thought that I had found my bliss at Ramesh’s but his passing away is a loss at a human level, even outside of his food.

One of the key objectives from this trip was to find a seafood place that felt real and where the food was the focus and deservedly so. My close friend and native Goan Irwyn D’Souza has been insisting for years that I should check out Anand’s at Anjuna so I finally did so this week. And I cannot thank Irwyn enough. This is a game changer for me.

Started 15 years ago, it serves classic Goan Hindu seafood cuisine and it is easily the best seafood I’ve had in years. I had a fish thali which had ladyfish, dried shrimps, prawn curry and mussels. Just eating a dish of dried shrimps took it far, far away from the tourist friendly menus in most places, with that funky smell and sharp flavour. The prawn curry was staggering, so deep and intensely packed with flavour that I wanted to just drink every last drop. The mussels were cooked in a dry grated coconut gravy that was wonderfully rustic.

The highlight though was the fried chonak (giant sea perch), a rougher, seafaring cousin of Bengal’s famous bhetki. I had it in the rava fry style and it also comes in a recheado style that I will try next week. The meat is whiter and sweeter than most other fish, and having a local perch means it’s far fresher and tastier than the absurd imported sea bass that people pay ten times as much for in restaurants (perch is part of what is commonly known as the sea bass family). There is a softness and delicateness to the chonak that means it needs to be cooked without messing with the flavours and texture, letting the fish be the hero and this is what Anand achieves. I would travel across Goa just to eat this one fish, one that deserves recognition as much as the hilsa or rohu in India’s fish heritage.