Joseph’s Bar

I wanted to show my friends my favourite bars and watering holes in Goa, so I had to start at Joseph’s. This place is an institution and I can imagine it having had a similar energy for close to a century now (though like all places that are legendary, mythology and truth can be used interchangeably and I’m not sure if the bar really is 90 years old).

The feni and Kokum “cocktail” is lethal, made with some cheap ass feni but it’s designed to get you giddy headed and happy high before you even know it, so that you’re swept along by the energy and camaraderie, the old man who knows where to get the best undo and who will get you a table at Club Nacional so you can line your stomach with some salted tongue. The pictures of Hindu goddesses next to statues of Jesus on the cross. Women in mini skirts and stilettos and hippies in vests and faded sarongs. Drunk North Indians singing Bollywood songs, zealous intellectuals debating the death of Communism and the local sitting in the corner drinking his beer and looking at it all with bemused detachment. 

It really shouldn’t work. It doesn’t make sense.

But it does. And it’s the best of what makes Goa special. And it’s a scene!