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Food: What’s on the menu? For this chef, nature decides
Meet Goa’s hot new Chef Avinash Martins, whose new style of serving food is impressing stars and locals alike
Much before ‘vocal for local’ became a fashionable mantra, Avinash Martins dreamed of creating a network for farmers across India, to empower them and give back to them what they richly deserve.
For a long time, this dream just remained a dream. Sure, the 40-year-old, Goa-born chef used local produce for his restaurant, Cavatina, which he runs with his wife, Tiz. But then came the pandemic and to his surprise, Avinash’s dream began to come true.
“With the first lockdown and erratic supplies of fresh vegetables and fruits, I stepped out and met the farmers and began buying from them for consumption, and also to help them sell their produce. Gradually, my relationship with them grew and soon they became a community I worked with,” says Avinash. “I make it a point to support only those who adhere to sustainable practices. From one community of farmers and local fishermen, artisans, toddy tappers and coconut-pluckers, I got connected to others in the state and today there are almost 300 of them in my network.”
Re-imagined Goan food
Cavatina offers “re-imagined Goan dishes” from the Saraswat and Portuguese communities. The chef uses local ingredients only and presents them in a contemporary manner. In the 10 years since the restaurant has been in existence, it’s become ‘the’ address for great food. Regulars, including cricket maestro Sachin Tendulkar, return frequently and new diners are eager for a table. Thomas Zacharias, the former executive chef of The Bombay Canteen and an advocate for regional cuisines, says: “Chef Avinash Martins is a household name in Goa’s upscale restaurant scene, thanks to his modern Goan restaurant, Cavatina.”
But it was not always that way. When Avinash and Tiz first opened the restaurant in 2012, the idea was to serve world cuisine.
“It was only some years later that I made a shift to ‘re-imagined’ Goan cuisine, because I wanted to celebrate what grew in my backyard and locally,” says Avinash. “My vendor programme changed and my dependency on imported stuff stopped and fortunately, this helped during the pandemic.”
Home, sweet home
Avinash lets nature determine what he will cook. He works with local farmers to grow fruits and vegetables organically, and this is the produce that enters his kitchen, both at his restaurant and at his latest project, C’est L’avi—A Table in the Hills, an artisanal farm-to-fork bespoke experience set in a cashew plantation near a fresh-water spring.
Gaunti (local) ingredients matter to him and his food reflects the changing seasons. His Goan mezze platter consisting of chauli beans hummus, flame-roasted vaingee (baby eggplant), cashew and coconut taramasalata and pineapple sansav is as Goan as it gets.
Dishes like rechadoverde banana fish, tiger prawn togarashi cola chili, pumpkin cashew nut, turmeric cauda smoked duck, chouris risotto amsol glaze, and beet and carrot paint may sound avant-garde, but they actually couldn’t be more local: these are some of Avinash’s magical creations with produce all Goans are familiar with.
The artist in him craves poetry on the plate, he says. “But there should be no distractions from the main ingredient,” he adds firmly. Instead, he prefers his dishes to have “a soul and a story to tell.”
The prodigal son
Avinash refers to himself as “a prodigal son”. He had left Goa at an early age to pursue his dreams, only to return home to do what he loves most.
“I am a family-oriented person and the eldest of four siblings. That apart, I could never get the smell of my land, my surroundings, the people, out of my system and knew I had to get back to Goa to settle,” he says.
“My exposure to cooking was tremendous, thanks to my grandmother, who was a great cook. The aromas of spices being pounded and ground wafted through the air as we returned home after playing football.This made me gravitate towards cooking,” he reminisces.
At 16, his passion for the kitchen made him change career tracks; he abruptly gave up on being a sea cadet and decided to study hotel management in Ooty, instead. His supportive parents acquiesced with his career choice and Avinash remains grateful that he was allowed to pursue his dream.
But this dream meant hard work. Avinash’s quest for learning and zeal to excel pushed him through 12-hour shifts as a banquets trainee, and then hours spent shadowing chefs on the kitchen. Then, restless by nature, Avinash left India after his training at The Oberoi Centre of Learning and Development and the all-day fine-dining restaurant ThreeSixty at the Oberoi, New Delhi, to travel the world and learn more.
He went to the USA and then Europe on a challenging assignment with a cruise liner company to change their menus across their cruises. This gave him the opportunity to put into practice what he had learnt already and to learn even more on the job. Ready to go that extra mile, he would travel to nearby places on his days off and work with restaurants, volunteering in their kitchens to learn and practice techniques he was relatively unfamiliar with. He tasted new cuisines, and made his palate more discerning, before his sense memories of Goa took over his heart and he was pulled back to his homeland.
From mundane to monumental
Opening a restaurant in Goa sounds like a dream come true and in many ways, it was that for Avinash and Tiz. But the first few years were difficult. As far as Avinash had travelled, as widely as he had expanded his knowledge, world cuisine did not quite cut it in his home state.
“For the first three years, Cavatina struggled to make its place,” Avinash admits. “I had to run a burger joint at Margao and take catering orders to keep the home fires burning.”
But once he turned his mind to his re-imagined Goan cuisine, turning the mundane into the monumental, everything changed. Cavatina became a success and remains one, and Avinash and Tiz are content to watch their guests enjoy their meals and unravel the stories of Goa that each dish tells.
“I get up fresh each morning and go to sleep a happy person,” smiles Avinash..
From HT Brunch, February 27, 2022
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