Few know that Chef Amninder Sandhu moved to Goa in 2008 with the idea to ‘retire’. It was a knee-jerk reaction from a burnout that had resulted from having opened six restaurants back to back for a private company in Mumbai.

“That susegad lasted all of one week. I started losing my mind while doing nothing. I was ready to get back into the kitchen,” she laughs. During that time, Sandhu took cooking lessons from an 88-year-old Goan woman and mastered her curries—cafreal, xacuti, sorpotel, vindaloo et all. Sixteen years on, she has launched a regional Indian cuisine restaurant, Bawri, partnering with co-founder Sahil Sambhi at Assagaon—the sleepy town that adopted city dwellers looking for an ‘escape’ during the lockdown, and that is now peppered with restaurants and bars. Spread across 10,000 square feet and demarcated by a koi fish pond, it shares space with VietNom, a Vietnamese brand that Sambhi has been running in Delhi for the past four years. “For Bawri, we’ve stuck to the Goan vibe and used landscaping and big plants to create cosy corners. We wanted a floating cabana for visitors to savour Indian khana sitting cross-legged like we have all grown up eating,” he adds.