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 or small mullets, and if the diner was willing to pay a higher price he or she could choose between kingfish, lemon fish, perch and red snapper. The items served also changed.
There would be the customary vegetarian dishes with chappati or puri , and added to this would be prawn curry, fried prawns, a dish of clams and another of crab. The thali indeed did become fancy, one that the socialite could actually claim having eaten with gusto, and when social media came anybody and everybody could even click a picture of it and post for the world to see what was the lunch or dinner fare of the day. But it wasn’t just the fish thali that changed or got upgraded.
Restaurants began competing and catering to people’s tastes and then you had the chicken thali , mutton thali and, the thali that made me write this piece when I heard of it, the pork thali . I haven’t tasted the pork thali and it does seem like a little bit of too much pork – four different dishes of pork – for one meal, but then tastes differ and there are takers for it. That’s not all, there is even a Portuguese thali , a little spicy at some restaurants and not at all Portuguese in fare, but fairly Portuguese cuisine at other restaurants that has also satiated the palates of the people.
In light of Italian food being quite popular in Goa, I really wouldn’t be surprised if someday there comes an Italian thali that offers a variety of pizzas and pastas too. The evolution of the Goan thali has been actually keeping pace with the changes that Goa is undergoing, and not just to cater to the varied tastes of the tourists. Can we imagine the super senior citizens, perhaps our grandparents, those in their late 80s, having a thali in a restaurant in their youth? They would possibly have opted for a fish curry and rice with a plate of fried fish on the side.
For sure, they would not have the option of a chicken thali , pork thali or Portuguese thali to choose from. The thali in Goa was not earlier seen as the eating option of the upper middle class and those above. They possibly would have frowned at it.
Today, even starred hotels will serve a thali and the superrich driving in luxury cars will not hesitate to order one in a restaurant. And that is exactly how Goa has changed, whether it is one thali at a time or one cuisine at a time, is debatable, but slowly and surely the thali has become the change Goa is seeing..
