My first exposure to Goan cuisine. I had no idea about the Portuguese influence. I have some reading up to do!
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I’m so surprised, because Goan is most likely to sneak onto any Indian restaurant menu in the form of Vindaloo and Goan fish curry 
Did you ever watch Top Chef Masters? (The late) Floyd Cardoz (who won his season) was probably one of the best-known ambassadors of Goan food in the US.
It’s among the most well-known regional cuisines outside India (but the Vindaloo-Fish curry rut gets old).
I’ve definitely had Vindaloo, but the whole Portuguese angle is new to me. I have so much to learn! I don’t watch Top Chef but that may eventually change. 
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They still speak Portuguese in Goa (I’m sure it’s indianized, but even so). And there were a lot of religious conversions with colonization, so the population is either Catholic or Hindu, and the cuisines are different.
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Just to add, I also had a really nice cocktail last night (no picture), but it arrived with the herb garnish (rosemary?) burning and giving off a lovely scent. Basically it was mezcal and cranberry (maybe some other things). Fantastic and verrrry alcoholic. I would not have remembered all of the food we ate, but I also thought it was fantastic! @Saregama, I looked back and I think the dinner from “last year” that you are recalling was the one we ate outside in August of 2022! You were away for the one we had over the summer '23, but I think last night’s was to my palate the best of the bunch. I really enjoyed all of the fishy things we had (croquetas, crab, curry, shrimp [mine not overcooked this time!],squid) also I enjoyed the chicken meatballs and the bits of beef, as well as the little salad and there were two chutneys (don’t know if that’s what they were): the eggplant pickle? (it was dark red), and there was another one that was chopped up veggies that packed a wallop (spice-wise), anyway enjoyed all of that too.
Thanks for arranging; we got to taste so many more amazing dishes in our numbers, and it was great to see everyone. Also thanks to the @vinouspleasures for suggesting and bringing the wine! What a treat.
Gosh you’re right! Last year was such a blur.
The Goan meal was the previous summer, last summer was Malvani, which I wasn’t back in time for, and last Feb was Parsi.
We should probably just have had a single Indian Table thread we keep adding to.
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It would be this one, but one of the mods threw a date into my title.
No, it should have been the thread for the first meal we had at Indian Table Aug '22 – every subsequent meal report should have been an update to that as a restaurant thread.
In any case, I think the two Goan meals were definitely better than the other two (not that I am complaining, getting to try so many things). Last winter (I think) there was a special to the regular menu one night when I was there with my daughter that was an enormous (really bigger than my hand) shrimp (?) that had been split open and grilled. I am seeing many pictures of such crustaceans as I am planning my trip to Portugal (home to many Goan restaurants, as it happens) and wonder if that is a particularly Goan type of seafood? Monster shrimp?
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No, not Goan, just coastal.
Those giant prawns are lobster-like and absolutely delicious.
(Aside from Mumbai, I’ve had them in New York and Toronto, but from specialty seafood places – but they’re not always or often available.)
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interesting meal and great company as always
excellent dishes I would definitely choose to have again
-the shrimp balchao, great chili sauce
-the chicken xacuti
-salt cod croquetas
-eggplant pickle
-kokum “cooler”
dishes I thought were very good but were somehow lacking
-the beef cutlets and patties
-squid with cheese - very mild and savory, like keto pasta
-the little dried shrimp and coconut salad
acceptable but unlikely to order again
-all the fish thali dishes, though they were better than my first experience with this thali
-pork belly - very flabby, not much flavor
-chicken meatballs - sauce was good, meatballs underseasoned and I just dont like the texture of chicken meatballs (not the chef’s fault)
In general I felt the food was spiced and seasoned very lightly - it didnt really pop. I agree that the meats including the feijoada and sardines in the first goan meal were considerably more exciting.
- IMO both of the fried items would have benefitted from being accompanied with some sort of chutney or sauce to set them off. The shreds of lemony cabbage were not enough, nor were the salady garnishes.
Always interested in what Chef Eric is trying!
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I mentioned to Jen that I found the beef cutlet didn’t have much spicing and reminded of schnitzel. This morning I recalled beef Milanese was served by many of the Portuguese restaurants near our town in Westchester and has a similar taste profile (though the beef is pounded thinner than the Indian Table version) so I’m guessing that’s the touchpoint for the beef cutlet dish.
As is pretty much common knowledge, we really like this place and have been going regularly for a couple of years now. We had this RW menu a couple of weeks ago with some (other) friends & I thought that the beef cutlet was actually better this time. Fine as part of a multi-offering meal, but not something I’d order as my entree. The beef strips app. was, in my opinion, the better beef dish. Generally, I think we all go into these type events realizing that we’ll get to try a lot of things but that not everything will be a hit. In this case, I thought that most of what I had were worth having, with some that I’ll try to convince them to keep on the menu. Its too bad that they had to substitute the hard shell crabs for the soft shells due to availability, but they were well seasoned and I didn’t mind cracking the shells and trying to eat this in “public”. And I thought the chicken meatballs to be pretty spicy, enough so that I inherited most of Ginny’s.
you married well!
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It was important to find someone with poor taste in men (& a light appetite). Now, 39 years later, she’s used to what she got.
Thats’ interesting – the beef cutlet actually had a masala paste under the batter, which I did not detect in the strips.
However, it was hard for me to detect flavors in some things because others were heavily spiced without an offsetting carb – for eg the shrimp balchao masala overwhelmed my taste of the meatballs, and I found them under-salted, which I don’t know if they were or weren’t. (Normally balchao would be eaten with rice or bread, it’s a pickle, that’s why it’s so heavily spiced.) The crab had similarly heavy spicing (again, meant for a rice foil).
In asides, he forgot that I requested the other beef (jeerem meerem, which Steve had liked the prior week), because we really didn’t need two pretty similar fried beef items.
And he also forgot we requested a vegetable per @JenKalb, which he had described to me in detail on the phone.
But he was very excited about the fried kingfish steaks and gave us more than we needed of that instead (at a slight upcharge) because I stressed that we had one pescatarian (I would have been fine with just half a piece of that, and more of something saucy).
@SteveR I was very surprised that they subbed rock crabs on the RW menu, because it’s a difficult and time-consuming thing to eat in that kind of setting.
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Not much question your wife had much better taste in men than my wife.
actually, jen mentioned the cutlet was delicately spiced, I kept coming back to the fish curry which probably blasted my palate. Anyhow, don’t get me wrong, I liked the cutlets!
Oh yeah, I liked it too, and also thought of schnitzel / milanese.
(But I was actually expecting an Indian cutlet, which is a spiced ground beef patty.)
If anyone liked the wine we brought and wants to purchase, it was a domaine pepiere “clos de briords” muscadet. Muscadet is widely known as the oyster wine but at the dawn of what has become known as the natural wine movement, a number of us, prompted by joe dressner discovered that good muscadet is versatile, ages well and is well-priced. Pepiere is a great producer, you should be able to find the wine for ~$20. The wine has a touch of sweetness which we think pairs well with spicy asian fare.
best,
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