BACK TO THE FUTURE

Goa's buzziest restaurants Praça Prazeres and Larder + Folk traverse the European continent for inspiration.

- VIVEK MENEZES

JUST OVER A YEAR AGO, I found Ralph Prazeres uncharacteristically pensive behind the counter of his lively bakery-café near my home in Panjim, one of the post-pandemic runaway successes that define Goa's increasingly merited hype as the food capital of the country. Padaria Prazeres (padaria means bakery in Portuguese) rocketed to attention immediately after opening in 2021 for its superb pastéis de nata-traditional custard tarts from Lisbon that have become an unstoppable global trend-and has kept on winning prizes and honours ever since. Still, it was obviously not enough for this Cordon Bleu-trained expert with hard-earned experience in the kitchens of some of the world's best restaurants, and on that day he finally confessed what was on his mind: Salade Niçoise.

It was such an odd, unlikely revelation that an inadvertent grin spread across my face until I realized the intense 32-year-old was being serious. He told me, "I need to start cooking my food, which is the French classics made exactly how they are meant to be. There is no one else doing it in India, but it's what I'm going to do." Bemused by this bold statement of purpose, I ventured to ask which dishes he had in mind that weren't being properly represented anywhere in this vast country, and that's when the young chef's eyes lit up with excitement talking about the iconic 19th-century salad from the Côte d'Azur-Nice is the largest city in the French Riviera other than the ancient port of Marseilles-along with other decidedly old-school fare from the golden age of European gastronomy. His passion struck me as charming, but also distinctly eccentric-this millennial Indian so hung up on cooking what even the French consider old-fashioned-and I returned home unconvinced his quirky dream would ever come true.