‘A Culinary Experience with our Kakis’ is a celebration of Goan food, community, and tradition
RACHEL ALAINA SHAH
Ask any true blue Goan where the real flavours of their beloved Goa truly reside and they will direct you to the home kitchens.
Founder, The Local Beat, Mackinlay Baretto also agrees. “It lives in the way a woman still soaks the kokum the night before or the way the sorpotel is never eaten on the day it is made because it needs two, three days to come into itself,” he says. “These are not just recipes. These are systems of knowledge.”
And it is this authentic taste that participants will get to sample at ‘A Culinary Experience with our Kakis’ on June 6 at Caju Grove in Guirim. This event brings together an all women crew of cooks, hosts, venue partners,
and collaborators.
Most importantly, it marks a milestone for the women behind the initiative. After a multi-month search and training programme across Goa, 60 women received grants through the SBI Foundation-Aspire For Her Sashakti EntrepreNaari initiative, an entrepreneurship programme designed to empower women in the local food and beverage sector. Spearheaded by the SBI Foundation, alongside SEED (Society for Educational Welfare and Economic Development) and Aspire For Her, it helps aspiring home chefs and entrepreneurs build sustainable food businesses. Through the programme, the women received expert-led online training, one-on-one mentoring sessions and structured networking opportunities designed to strengthen their business operations. The training modules covered areas such as branding, digital outreach, customer engagement, and strategies for accessing larger markets.
Three of the ‘kakis’ part of The Local Beat received this `50,000 grant as well. “For a ‘kaki’ who has made sansav or sorpotel for village feasts her entire adult life, being selected from a competitive pool and receiving a formal grant is an act of institutional recognition she may never have experienced before. It says: what you do has economic value, and you deserve support for it,” says Baretto.
And indeed, for these older Goan women who have spent decades cooking out of their homes, feeding families and quietly sustaining entire culinary traditions, the grants are meaningful in ways that go well beyond the amount.
“When I was chosen for the programme, it felt really good. I attended all the sessions whether online or offline and they taught us a lot, like about GST, marketing, and cooking in restaurants,” says Alisha Jalmi, one of the ‘kakis’ who received the grant and has been working with The Local Beat for the past five years.
The grant money won’t build a commercial kitchen, but it can buy a sealer, fund registration, upgrade packaging, or cover the initial cost of entering an online platform.
And the upcoming dining experience in Guirim is more than a meal. It’s an opportunity for these women to showcase their skills professionally and to help people experience real traditional Goan cooking in a commercialised food landscape. “The home cook is the last line of defence for our food culture. You can’t recover the recipe from a cookbook. It lives only in her hands. So, supporting her is not charity. It is cultural conservation with an economic dividend. Goa’s future is in recognising the extraordinary wealth that already exists in its kitchens,” says Baretto.
Insia Lacewalla one of the event collaborators and founder of W.E. a social club that brings together women entrepreneurs, creatives, and professionals through thoughtfully designed experiences, states that what drew her to this collaboration was the authenticity at its heart. “When I heard about the ‘kakis’ and the stories behind their cooking, it felt like a natural alignment of values. I believe that empowerment needs a voice, a space and initiatives like these. This initiative offered exactly that: a space where community, food, and women’s dignity could come together meaningfully,” she says.
Beyond the hearty and fulfilling meal on June 6 lies most importantly, the love. “When a ‘kaki’ cooks for you, she is cooking from memory, from love, and from a lineage,” says Lacewalla. “That emotional texture simply cannot be replicated in a commercial kitchen. It is the difference between hearing a song on the radio and hearing it sung by the person who wrote it for you.”
The event marks the first of many for the women behind the scenes.
“Everyone here cooks with their whole heart and that’s exactly how it should be,” says Jalmi. “My hope for visitors is that they should always remember Goa and the taste of the food they ate here.”
(The event will take place on June 6 at
Caju Grove, Guirim.)
