What to eat in Goa: twelve dishes, and where to try them

Goan food is coastal cooking built on rice, fish and coconut, soured with kokum or vinegar and warmed with chillies, and the one dish to start with is fish curry rice, the everyday lunch. From there the famous names follow: vindaloo, xacuti, cafreal and prawn balchão, with bebinca to finish.

Two kitchens shaped it. Goan Hindu cooking is mostly fish and vegetables, soured with kokum and tamarind, sweetened with jaggery and cooked in coconut oil. Goan Catholic cooking joined that base to Portuguese ways: vinegar, bread, and pork dishes such as sorpotel and vindaloo. Below are the twelve dishes we'd point a first visit towards, grouped the way you'll meet them, and then where to eat them.

What Goan food tastes like

Most Goan cooking balances three things: the richness of coconut, a sour note from kokum, tamarind or vinegar, and heat from chillies, red or green. Rice is the constant, and fish matters so much that a Goan meal is thought incomplete without it.

The Portuguese thread, and the Konkani one

Portugal ruled Goa for 451 years, and it shows on the plate and in the words. The Portuguese brought bread, vinegar and chillies, along with cashew, pineapple, guava, potato and tomato from Latin America, and Goan cooks made them their own.

The other thread is Konkani, Goa's own language, and the older kitchen of rice, fish, coconut and kokum. Many dishes hold both at once: vindaloo is a Portuguese name over Goan spice, and xacuti, a Konkani name, has a Portuguese spelling too, chacuti.

• Vindaloo comes from carne de vinha d'alhos, meat in wine and garlic. Goan cooks swapped the wine for palm vinegar and added spice.
• Recheado is Portuguese for 'stuffed': a red masala packed into mackerel or pomfret.
• Pão is the Portuguese-era bread, brought in the early 17th century. The village baker who delivers it is the poder.
• Balchão, prawns in a vinegary pickle masala, came to Goa with the Portuguese, most likely from Malacca.
• Cafreal is traced to Portugal's African colonies, possibly Mozambique, and to the African soldiers who served under the Portuguese.
• Xacuti takes its name from the Konkani shagoti, and is said to come from Harmal, the village now called Arambol.
• Ros, in ros omelette, is the Konkani word for gravy.
• Feni takes its name from the Sanskrit phena, froth, for the foam that rises as it distils.

Curries, fish and the famous names

These six are the heart of the list: the everyday plate, and the named dishes Goan kitchens are known for. Most are eaten with rice at lunch or dinner.

Lunch

Fish curry rice

Goa's everyday lunch: fish in a curry of coconut, soured with kokum, over plain rice. Fish curry with rice is a staple of Goan Hindu cooking, and the simplest way into the cuisine.

For the full plate, order a fish thali; the one at Ritz Classic in Panjim is famous.

Photo: Sujel Patil, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

With rice

Prawn balchão

Fresh prawns fried, then cooked down in a fiery, tangy masala of dried red chillies, spices and vinegar. It is closer to a pickle than a curry: made days ahead, it keeps well and is served without reheating.

Eat it with plenty of plain hot rice, which is how it is served.

Lunch or dinner

Recheado

Mackerel, pomfret or kingfish stuffed with a red masala of dried chillies, garlic, ginger, spices, tamarind and vinegar, then pan-fried.

Souza Lobo on Calangute beach names a recheado pomfret among its dishes.

Lunch or dinner

Xacuti

A rich curry of toasted coconut, white poppy seeds and large dried red chillies, warmed with pepper, nutmeg, cinnamon and cloves. It is usually made with chicken, crab, lamb or beef.

Souza Lobo on Calangute beach serves a crab xacuti.

With a drink

Chicken cafreal

Whole chicken legs in a green masala of chillies, fresh coriander, garlic, ginger and spice, sharpened with lime or vinegar, then pan-fried until charred. It's a favourite in Goa's bars and taverns, served with potato wedges and lime.

Don't confuse it with piri-piri chicken: in Goa, cafreal is green and piri-piri is red.

Lunch or dinner

Vindaloo

Pork in garlic, palm vinegar and spice, the Goan remaking of a Portuguese dish. In British curry houses the name came to mean simply a very hot curry; the traditional Goan recipe is sour, garlicky and has no potatoes.

Order the pork: it is the traditional meat.

Goan breakfast, and bread at every hour

Bread came to Goa with the Portuguese in the early 17th century, and it never left. Pão is the everyday loaf; poi is a round, soft bread with a pocket, made half with whole wheat. Traditionally poi was leavened with toddy, the fermented sap of the coconut palm, and baked for under a minute on the floor of a wood-fired oven.

In the villages, the poder, the baker, still cycles round each morning with a horn. The bread from those rounds is the base of the Goan breakfast, and of the snacks that keep going late into the night.

Breakfast

Bhaji pão

The Goan breakfast, and a vegetarian one: a bowl of spiced vegetable bhaji with fresh pão to tear and dip.

Eat it early, where you see people stopping on the way to work.

Breakfast or a snack

Sausage pão

Spicy Goan chouriço, the local sausage, cooked and stuffed into fresh poi. Mapusa market sells the sausages, along with spices, cashews, fruit and sweets.

Mapusa market is open daily and liveliest on Fridays.

Photo: Aaron C, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Evenings and late

Ros omelette

An omelette with green chillies, onion and coriander, served in ros, a spicy chicken or chickpea gravy often close to a xacuti, and eaten with pão. Food carts sell it in Goa's towns, and it's a late-night classic.

The gravy can be chicken or chickpea, so ask which if you don't eat meat.

Something sweet, something cool, something strong

Finish with the three that belong to Goa as much as any curry: a layered pudding made above all for Christmas, a pink drink that cools the heat, and a spirit distilled from the fruit of the cashew tree.

Christmas, and all year

Bebinca

Goa's layered pudding of flour, sugar, ghee, egg yolk and coconut milk, built one thin layer at a time, traditionally 7 to 16 of them. Called the queen of Goan desserts, it is the centrepiece of kuswar, the Christmas sweets, and sold all year.

Goan bakeries make it year-round, so it's easy to take a slice home.

Photo: Susomoinhos, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

With or after a meal

Sol kadhi

Coconut milk and dried kokum skins, with a little garlic, chilli and salt; the kokum turns it a deep purple-pink. Served chilled, it is drunk as a digestive after spicy meals, especially fish.

Order it with a fish thali, or on its own on a hot afternoon.

Evenings

Feni

Goa's own spirit, distilled from fermented cashew apple juice or from coconut toddy, and bottled at about 43%. Cashew feni has held a geographical indication since 2009, and Goa named feni a heritage spirit in 2016.

Try a kokum feni at Joseph Bar in Panjim. Sip it, and never drive after.

Photo: Dr. Raju Kasambe, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Where to try Goan food, area by area

Our list runs from Siolim to the south. For Goan food itself, head for the five in bold. The rest are places we'd happily send you to for a very good meal of another kind.

Siolim, home to Rivara, has three of these in the village itself. Panjim's three make a good lunch before a walk through Fontainhas, and for sunset tables across the north, see dinner by the water.

Eat like a local: markets, seasons and a cooking class

Goan food follows the calendar. March brings urrak, April is cashew season and May is for mangoes, and the markets show it all at once. If you'd rather learn than order, there are kitchens that will teach you.