Cavatina by Avinash Martins

Chef Avinash Martins has built Cavatina into what most critics now consider the single most important modern Goan restaurant in India. Housed in a small, warmly lit room in Benaulim — a few minutes from the Taj Exotica resort in South Goa — the restaurant began in 2012 as a continental and western room before Martins turned his attention to the cuisine of his own heritage. That decision re-wrote his career. Culinary Culture Co. ranked him among India's top 30 chefs in 2022, and Cavatina has held a place on every serious list of the country's finest tables since.

The tasting menu is the only format here. It moves through between seven and ten courses — sometimes more in the extended format — and draws from Martins' own library of archival Goan recipes, re-worked with the pacing, plating, and wine-pairing logic of contemporary fine dining. Signature preparations include a reworked sorpotel, a house-cured pork belly, and tableside services that call back to the Portuguese-Catholic traditions of the state. The sourcing is anchored in small farms and fishermen Martins has worked with for years; the kitchen runs no imports on the ingredient list.

The room itself is decorated with relics of Goan material culture: clay cooking pots, garrafões used to store feni, a vintage Lambretta at the bar. The interior is unmistakably regional without tipping into theme-park pastiche. The service is personal — Martins himself is often on the floor — and the pacing allows for the kind of three-hour evening that this level of cooking deserves. Wine pairings lean heavily on Indian producers from Nashik and the Deccan, alongside a curated Portuguese and Mediterranean list.

Cavatina is not in the centre of Goa's dining geography — Benaulim is forty minutes from Panjim and requires a car — but that isolation is part of the proposition. This is a destination restaurant of the kind that Napa Valley produced in the 1990s: worth the drive, worth the planning, worth the wait for a table.

For a proposal in Goa, there is no more considered option. The room seats fewer than thirty, which guarantees privacy without feeling empty. Chef Martins will, if briefed in advance, coordinate a quiet presentation between courses — a ring in a tasting spoon, a dedicated dessert plate inscribed with the couple's names, a discreet glass of Krug. The cooking's pedigree ensures that the evening reads as a serious statement of intent. Book a weekend sunset reservation four weeks in advance and the staff will make the rest of the evening hold its shape around the moment.