How Pakiza became a go-to eatery for biryani & curry lovers of Panjim

It’s easy to miss Pakiza in Panjim. It’s in Fontainhas, recently included in a list of the world’s prettiest neighbourhoods. This means you can barely move for all the influencers making reels and tourists looking for cute places for a drink.

This modest restaurant in a side-lane can be hard to spot.


Pakiza, which seems to be run by multiple generations of women, is worth finding. It has been supplying simple, delicious food to Panjim residents for ages, and appears to find no reason to change, despite the tourist invasion. As a result, its menu is a snapshot of a stage of development that the more ambitious places have left behind.

As repeated food surveys show, biryani tops Indian food preferences — even in the face of attempts by some politicians to undermine this choice by tying it, disparagingly, to a particular community. Pakiza serves vegetarian and non-vegetarian biryanis, but also anda biryani. This is an option many biryani sellers drop because it isn’t acceptable to strict vegetarians, but also not meaty enough for committed nonvegetarians. Yet, beyond this binary, it’s delicious and affordable, especially when made with fried eggs as Pakiza does.

Pakiza also offers an even more affordable option — plain biryani rice, without meat pieces. This is how many people started eating biryani, and still do, dished up from giant handis and eaten while standing in the street. You get the rice, which many Indians find imperative for stomachfilling satisfaction, with a flavour of the meat that many want but can’t afford.

The non-rice equivalent of this is a plate of plain gravy, to be eaten with roti, also available at Pakiza. Again, this is how millions of people still fill their stomachs across India, but increasingly rarely in sit-down restaurants, even really simple ones like Pakiza. To justify overheads and customer expectations, especially in more affluent areas like Fontainhas (or Goa, in general), restaurants are moving to expand their offerings.

This means a move from a rice-plate to thali model. Instead of the basics of rice, gravy and maybe one bhaji, you now need more options. In Goa, this has got systematised into rice, curry or dal, dry bhaji, sweet, pickle, salad, solkadi (a digestive drink flavoured with kokum) and one showpiece item like a piece of fried fish. This is the model now available across the state, and while standards vary, you rarely get a bad one.

How this selection has evolved is a mystery, especially the salad, which is often just chopped cabbage and left untouched by many. But the elements have become almost sacrosanct. Yo u can’t serve less, but you can serve more, and this is the next stage of development. To stand out amid all the Goan fish thalis, restaurants are expanding into what are called, variously, Bhatkar (landlord), Ravan or Maharaja thalis, which add on many more fish, chicken, sweets and other items.

These mega-thalis are monuments to excess, but they find takers, especially among tourists. Sometimes people attempt to eat the whole thing themselves, but more rationally, these megathalis are shared. At which point something curious happens.

The thali takes its essential form from the aversion to contamination by touch which runs deep in many Indian communities. Instead of sharing food from common dishes, in the Western style, the thali provides a safely individualised meal.

But when people start sharing from one thali, it becomes its opposite — the thal, where many people eat from one very large plate, in a perhaps deliberate declaration of equality and connection. It’s unlikely that people sharing a megathali think explicitly in these terms, but these changes in how we eat are happening across India and show how our food habits are always in flux. There is neither right or wrong in this, but it does help one appreciate places like Pakiza, which still allow you the simple satisfaction of a plate of curry and rice.