Chef Jerson voyage to Kolhapur

Hospitality Lexis embellishes the Kolhapuri Festival directed by Executive Chef Jerson Fernandes at Novotel Goa Dona Sylvia

Hospitality Lexis / Print Edition December 2019

A chef who built his distinguished reputation by starring in every action he makes, the Executive Chef of Novotel Goa Dona Sylvia.  Having experience from the major hotel chains like P&O cruise liners, The Taj Hotels, Los Angeles based Berggruen Hotels and Ritz Carlton. Chef Jerson focuses on acquiring the highest quality ingredients, creativity on palate with precision and abundant planning and execution. His innovations and brilliant dishes strives him for continual improvement. Recently, Chef Jerson was on transit to generate absolutely bizarre experience for the guests of Novotel Goa his research on Kolhapuri cuisine and the execution of the Kolhapuri Food festival was topnotch entity. 

Cultural Feel & Thought 

See how the whole reason for doing the Kolhapuri Food Festival as to make the guest feel that they are actually dinning in Kolhapur and to give them Kolhapuri experience. So if you ask me the though behind of wearing the pagadi was Firstly, to make them comfortable. Number two to create an aura of royalty of dinning Kolhapuri Thali because that’s how the Kolhapuri people normally eat once they go for a bigger event or go out to socialize or they go for a wedding that’s how they have their meals. They wear pagadi as their honour and pride. I personally visited Kolhapur I saw people dining that way, so basically it’s a royal dining experience given to the guests. Secondly, is for a connect, a cultural connect with Kolhapur and thirdly is for them to know what exactly Kolhapuri fetta is so, these were the three reason of getting Kolhapur on the table giving them the slice of Kolhapuri culture.

Dishes Includes

The dish includes twelve different types of Kolhapuri dishes, apart from this including desserts and welcoming drinks the Kolhapuri thali holds twenty to twenty-two delicacies. 

Order of Eating 

First, you’re welcomed with the welcome drink so that is sour curry after that what we do is we place the thali but before you actually start with the thali there are few titbits which actually have to be eaten like the roasted peanut and jaggery and onions which we slice and marinade. So you first bite these and then you start with the main course and then dessert, So Kolhapuri Thali is not very complicated to eat.  

Empowering the Local vendors

When you’re doing a festival from a particular region, you build a connection with that region ingredients. So it will be very wrong to do Kolhapuri Food Festival and get the ingredients from goa itself, so I don’t think that’s fair, that is why I visited Kolhapur not just to meet the people or to learn the different techniques but my whole reason of going to Kolhapur was to understand the ingredients to understand the symphony of flavours to learn about cuisine to learn about how different ingredients react. At the same time, I also kind of establish a connection with the local vendors over there so it was beneficial for them also because now we got all the ingredients from those local vendors and this is going to be in Goan food menu in the future, so definitely that relation with the local vendors is well established and we keep buying from them. So I would say empowering them, Yes definitely because we used all ingredients from Kolhapur and not from Goa and it has also helped them in establishing themselves in the Kolhapuri market, most of the hotels were contacting me asking about the Kolhapuri food festival, they also need ingredients so this were theses vendors will come into play. Most of the vendors we contacted were farmers and small-time vendors who were turned into entrepreneur. 

Kolhapuri food festival

I had never visited Kolhapur before, so it was my first visit to Kolhapur but what I wanted to do was I had a very strong platform of the festival because I had Chef Dev who is a master in Kolhapuri cuisine, so whenever we used to talk we always had a debate about Kolhapuri Food, so he used to keep telling me that Kolhapuri food is not just about spicy food, people know Kolhapuri food as the spiciest but that is not the case there’s a lot more and if you want to see what true Kolapur food is that you have to visit Kolhapur and explore it. So that is how the food festival came into being, Now, after looking at the festival every second day I get call of appreciation and that they also want to do similar festival because the festival didn’t just highlighted the food. I have done more than 25 festival across the globe and all my festival are unique. Whenever I do a festival I make the local product like all the Kolhapur chappals the spices and the Kolhapuri attire, the herbs were brought to goa to get tasted get to feel. There was jaggery made in the houses of local farmers so this was also generating revenue for the farmers & the locals. This way everyone who visit goa and eat Kolhapuri thali will take a slice and a feel of Kolhapur with them So these are memories we’re creating with this festival.

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