15 Dec 2019  |   04:38am IST

WHEN IDENTITIES AND JOURNEYS CONVERGE IN A MELTING POT IN MANDREM

Sujay Gupta, @SujayGupta0832

 

 W

hen night settles in amidst the foliage, the woods, the hills and the sea in Mandrem and there’s a distinct drop in natural decibel levels, Matt and Meghana, perk up their ears to catch two distinct sounds they have come to be familiar with.

From one side there is the sound of the sea from Ashwem and from the other from Mandrem. Though they are sounds of the same sea, trained ears know the difference as the water crashes against sharper rocks in one while it caresses gentler flatter stones in the other part o f the ocean.

And when these nuances of nature are a part of your daily ecosystem, which learns to hear and talk to the sea, it is perhaps one of the better reasons to give up life in Detroit or Bombay and run a restaurant with patches of green, and live on the same plot in a little cottage, overlooking the kitchen and the guests tables.

Verandah, the restaurant Meghana and Matt run in Mandrem, is a melting pot of dislocated identities finding base, reason and me aning. The experience is beyond running a restaurant which is truly unique, run by folks with diverse identities and roots each converging to a Goan existence and way of life.

Here fresh greens are plucked from a vegetable patch carved out of one level in a restaurant which looks more like a small farm, with each level embedded in a little hillock. For many meals, the veggies go straight from the veggie patch to the chef for your salads and other dishes setting new benchmarks of freshness.

Distinctly European, the produce is from the land and locally sourced, so much so that even produce or products that need to be necessarily of international standards are procured from similar folks from abroad settled here, finding meaning and a reason to live i n Goa. For instance Barbara who runs Happy Cow, makes fresh camembert, the moist soft creamy cheese and the similar and brie. Even the feta comes from her. The fish and other sea food, due to Mandrem’ s proximity to the Malwan region of Maharashtra, often comes from there.

But what Matt Daniels and Meghana Srivastava have curated with such produce is what makes Verandah such an eclectic melting pot of not just people but cuisine. There is a brunch menu with copious traces of breakfast- the Eggs Benedict with salmon is a melt in your mouth authentic kick start. But the evening mains, on the first level after a short climb from the road that meanders from Morjim and snakes its sway to Nadrem and beyond, is the real deal, where Matt, Meghana and Chef Praveen’s creativity come to the fore.

The Rotisserie Chicken on Saturdays is worth a special trip, with roasted potatoes, house salad, wild garlic sauce and cape gooseberry jam. For yours truly, it’s a straight pick between this and the ‘Bistro style lamb chops’ with kojlrabi puree and chips, glazed shallots, charred broccoli and port wine reduction. The mussels in white wine, tomato and garlic broth, with goan chorizo, is where Europe meets Goa. Soak most of this with fresh bread baked at the Verandah of different flavours.

You can’t really keep Goa, or food from the Indian coasts away from the table at Verandah. They manage that even in their home made pizzas with exotic names like Puttanesca- which has crumb fried sardines simply placed on the base, with olives, capers and cheese blend or simply a pizza called ‘Goa’ which has Goan sausage, caramelized onion and local cheese blend.

But each dish or drink pairs with a story, of distant homelands, peripatetic identities and touching base. On the top most level of the hillside, literally outside the front door of the cottage where Matt and Meghana live, is a chilled station, where Nitya works her nimbl e fingers to make magical cocktails out of Indian gin. This place explodes with chatter, jazz and her cocktails, where folks hang before or after a meal making new friends, restoring old friendships, or simply engaging with loved ones.

Nitya is from Chennai, raised in Singapore and then lived in Australia. She moved here with her Russian partner Vlad Mizikov and were regular guests as Verandah till they popped the question and became a part of the team here. Nitya is an artist an looking to move to Lisbon for a short while to do art therapy.

Matt, a Detroit graphic designer, worked for a travel guide in the USA, called “Let’s Go”, which sent him to India where the India bug bit him. He taught Graphic Design at Dr Reddy,’s Foundation in Hyderabad and then started a stuidio in Bombay and taught young designers as he found Bangalore based film student Meghana and then Goa, in t hat order. Both now spend the summer in the US running a food truck in Detroit and the winter running Verandah.

This brings us to this quintessential narrative of migration and what it does to the land and its people. At times the search for identity and belonging does not conform to geographical boundaries and go beyond passport controls and immigration checks.

These are folks who do not quite take from the land but embellish its use and create spaces that blend into nature. Every civilization needs melting pots, which enrich the local civilization in a manner slowly felt. This place on a hillock in Mandrem, where the different sounds of the sea can be heard and different tongues tell stories of their life’s journeys, the recipe of fulfillment is created daily.