India's Best Restaurant

Goa is now officially the subcontinent's culinary capital. Yet amid the surge in gastronomical excellence, modestly appointed but searingly ambitious Cavatina has ascended right to the top.

- Vivek Menezes

On the morning of 28 March 2020, just four days after India plunged into "the world's strictest lockdown" to combat COVID-19, chef Avinash Martins set up to cook in front of his phone camera in the garden of his ancestral home in Velim, in the rural hinterland of South Goa.

His first full-length video featured kingfish head cooked with raw mangoes from the ancient trees overhead. In a world sectioned off into quarantine isolation, it struck a chord and quickly racked up thousands of views. Martins had already been thinking about shifting gears at Cavatina, the steady and well-regarded restaurant he runs with his wife Tiz Lyngdoh in nearby Benaulim. Now the talented 41-year-old resolved that cooking by the numbers with imported ingredients no longer made sense. Henceforth, his supply chain would be his own backyard in the gorgeously beautiful taluka of Salcete, and his food would celebrate the farmers, foragers, and fishermen who toiled to provide his ingredients.

The term "farm to table" is routinely bandied about in India, but in this case it was no gimmick. From the moment Martins started implementing his new culinary blueprint, it was readily apparent he was in the sweet spot of everything desirable in contemporary haute cuisine: sustainable, seasonal, ethically sound, seriously playful, and full of technique. Once he reopened Cavatina with its new tasting menu at the end of 2020, streams of culinary pilgrims started heading to South Goa. An insistent buzz began to grow: Chef Martins is pushing the envelope of excellence, and serving the best and most interesting modern restaurant food in India.