There was a time when there was the fish thali and the veg thali in Goa, with a variant of the latter being the shivrak thali on certain days of the week. The fish thali had the catch of the day as the main item, very seasonal and possibly mackerels, sardines, soles or whatever was in abundance in the fish market that morning when the restaurant owner went shopping. Did I say restaurant owner, allow me to correct it to café owner or even ‘hotel’ owner, for café and hotel were synonymous to mean an eatery, while a restaurant was up-class and a couple of decades back finding a thali in such a restaurant would be rare.
Sometime along the way, in the vegetarian ‘hotels’ came the Udupi or South Indian thali and then the North Indian thali that provided a taste of these cuisines in these purely vegetarian restaurants. Some of these also had a special thali that instead of plain steamed rice served veg pulao and perhaps an extra dish of vegetables. The fish thali in the 1990s meant fish curry, a piece or two of fried fish, a couple of vegetarian dishes and of course rice.
The common items were the papad, a little salad and a dollop of pickle. There was little you could choose. And then sometime and somewhere along the way this too evolved.
The fish thali found itself on the menus of restaurants, even the upmarket ones, and you could choose what you wanted to eat. Choose, in the sense that the restaurants offered the standard fish thali that perhaps had a mackerel or sole.