India’s OG food writer Vikram Doctor moved to Goa from Mumbai a couple of years ago. In this guide, he gives us the lowdown on what to get (and what not to get) in Mapusa Market.
When Vikram recommends food, and places to get it at, we listen intently, and take notes obsessively. We suggest you do too.
Simonia Stores has decent Shrewsbury biscuits and lapsi, a cold sweet wheat porridge that I actually like despite it looking like congealed vomit. They sell bebinca, but I loathe almost all bebinca, so can’t recommend it.
Sequeira Stores just around the corner from Simonia, makes some more traditional biscuits, like korpiados, which look like pieces of cardboard but are sweet-ish and somehow really nice.
I’m really not much of a fan of the traditional Goan breads, no matter how iconic the tourism people make them out to be. They look nice, sure, but the reality is that the price controls mean they are usually made with substandard wheat and taste just doughy and heavy. Very few places occasionally make it with good wheat and toddy and you can see the difference. So I show people the bread section which is next to Simonia’s and Sequeira’s, and sometimes give in and buy katron, or undo, or whole wheat poee, but I never really feel like eating it.
If people don’t want to risk the aunties with the freshly made and amazing smelling sausages at the Friday market, I recommend people get Goa sausage at Royal-T. It is open on other days of the week as well, and has a lot of Goan specialties, like brine mango pickle, perad, masalas, etc.
You know you’re in Goa where a market offers you a café where you can get alcohol from 8:30 am. The booze at Café SF Xavier is certainly better than having their chai, which is vile. In the chaos of the Friday market, it’s a good place to take a break with a beer and a beef samosa or chop.
Mapusa fish market is wonderful and big, with two large halls and in between a place where you can get your fish cleaned. I don’t really buy fish from here, because Urmila who cooks for us ridicules my fish buying skills, so now I just give her money to get it for us from the fish stalls near the Chapora ferry in Siolim when she comes in the morning. If you want a guide to the fish market, you’re better off with Chef Anumitra from Edible Archives. But I do go to the fish market, both just to admire the offerings, but also to buy snacks from The Ladies Self Help Group stall in the fish market that is rather oddly located in the passage connecting the halls. They make local Goan sweets and snacks, all vegetarian, which would be odd in another place, but makes perfect sense in Goa.
I buy fruits (occasionally, there are better places) from some of the guys in the fruit section outside, except for bananas, which are always only the small local bananas (or, the long Moira ones, but those are a bit too starchy for eating as fruits) from the ladies outside the market. I also buy local veggies from them like sweet potatoes and other tubers, pumpkin, breadfruit, and others. There are a couple of guys who sell spices from whom I buy star anise, nutmeg, and mace from, though nothing else. They keep trying to get me to buy their masalas, but I’m sceptical. What I do buy from them is the resin we put in the evenings on burning coconut husks to keep away mosquitoes and mouldy smells from the house. This is something we’ve learned from locals like Urmila and it really works. I visit the pottery section mostly to buy the earthen pots with side handles in which the husks are put. So, not edible, but one reason I visit the market.
Another non edible, aromatic purchase is agarbattis from Ramakrishna’s stall. He’s a market legend, partly because the foreigners treat him like some kind of perfume genius, able to look in their eyes and tell them which scent they should use, and partly because he fully buys into this, only opening his shop occasionally and keeping you dangling. I was and still am quite dubious about all this, especially since he’s almost definitely getting his scents from the same big four chemical companies everyone in the world gets their scents from, but I will say his long-lasting sticks are really nice, so I end up buying them when he’s open.
I keep wanting to buy the pyramids of palm jaggery from the ladies who sit, for some odd reason, in the flower market. But, sadly, I really don’t find Goan palm jaggery on par with what’s available from Mangalore or Tamil Nadu, let alone Sri Lanka and Bengal.