Memory on a Plate

AUTOCHTHONOUS. A WORD heavy with roots.

It means sprung from the soil itself—native not by accident but by origin, by essence. It is not nostalgia. It is knowing. It is belonging to a place not just in body, but in breath, in belief, in being.

That’s the word that sets the table here. Because if there’s anything the food at Hosa in Goa taught me, it’s this: we must all strive to be autochthonous—in what we cook, in how we live, in the stories we tell with spice.

In India today, what we call fine dining is stuck in a strange stasis—a self-congratulatory loop of mimicry masquerading as invention. The menus read like they’ve time-travelled from New York circa 2001, or London, San Francisco from the early aughts. Dal makhani shows up in miniature pressure cookers. Kulchas oozing parmesan and processed cheese parade as breakthroughs. But I remember making those in Manhattan kitchens in 2001, and even then they weren’t new. Foam?

We did that in 1999. And then flushed it down the toilet—literally and metaphorically. We called it fusion-confusion, or worse, brain-drain: a cuisine that played with the mind but starved the soul.

And yet, these tired tricks keep earning accolades. Awards pile up like puff pastry. Restaurants win applause for serving the same stale compositions, dressed up in the language of progress but frozen in time.

Then came Chef Harish Rao. At first, I walked into Hosa expecting another spectacle. But what arrived wasn’t a gimmick. It was grace.

The meal began in a whisper. The Shimeji mushroom varuval, earthy and intense, sat beside a silky mushroom pâté, like two siblings in quiet dialogue. Then came cracked potatoes, each crisp like a question, sitting under a cloud of cauliflower mousse—tender, teasing, textured.

A prelude followed—a kari dosa, egg yolk trembling under bone marrow hollandaise, with a bowl of salana that didn’t just accompany the dish, it conversed with it. Then a flaky roti canai, dipped into a chicken curry so familiar it felt like it had known me before I’d tasted it.

The mains came in quiet confidence. An aubergine steak, charred to the edge of collapse, with a yogurt sphere that cooled and coiled around it like a lullaby. The Alleppy prawn curry, lush and full-throated, came with no tricks, just trust. The curry leaf butter crab with its deep richness and laid-back neer dosa was indulgent without ever being insecure. And the Yalpannam pork, paired with smoky bacon rice, was the kind of dish that doesn’t ask for approval—it already knows.

Then dessert. And dessert didn’t pretend. It didn’t dress up or perform. It soothed. Coconut jasmine ice cream, light as breath and barely sweet. Coconut curry leaf ice cream, herbal and haunting. Chocolate chilli cheesecake, molten and mischievous.

And then, the hibiscus and raw mango sorbets—floral, feral, and fearless. They didn’t end the meal. They opened a window.

Chef Harish isn’t cooking for cameras. He is cooking with commitment. A man from Chennai and Hyderabad, now living alone in Goa, far from family, far from the familiar, doing what so few have the courage to do: cook without ego, cook without pretence, cook like the act itself is a form of prayer. This is the accent of our ancient future—food that remembers where it came from and dares to become what it must. In it, there’s spice, yes, but also spirit. There’s technique, yes, but also tenderness.

Chef Harish is not reinventing India. He’s remembering it. And in doing so, he reminds us what food—and life—should be: rooted, real, and radically honest.

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