Her voice is often the first thing you hear as you enter this tiny boulangerie and patisserie on Panaji’s west side. “I yell a lot”, she says. “I think my voice has changed since Padaria.”
If you’re heading to North Goa, Padaria Prazeres will likely top every list of recommended musts sent your way. Owned and run by Ralph Prazeres and Stacy Gracias, it is popular with tourists, locals and economic émigrés alike. Colourful as a petit four, with the square footage to match.
Pranali Pai has been there from the very beginning. She got the job as café manager through a friend who handled Padaria’s socials. “It was very new, like five of us when Padaria started.” This was in April 2021, and for the first months, with the country pretty much locked down, the café ran almost entirely as a takeaway kitchen.
excuse me, miss
“I am a very talkative person, so I thought I should study business management”. Her mum encouraged her to consider a career where she could be herself; bring her personality and her natural warmth into her interactions with people. So Pranali decided to go into hospitality and studied at the Institute of Hotel Management in Goa. She was placed at the Grand Hyatt through college. “I started working very early. 19, I think.”
After the Grand Hyatt came ITC, followed by a 3-month stint at a local casino. By then she was done with five stars. “I wanted to do like a café, and then COVID hit, and Ralph had just opened Padaria at that point.”
stand and deliver
She makes her job look effortless. Orders are called out to the open kitchen. The counter also handles seating, which means table numbers and plates in a room with five tables inside and another five outside. On busy days, when there’s nowhere to sit, “you have to convince them to wait, hold on.”
But she says it’s harder than it looks from a table-side view. “People assume [running a café] is very easy. You can’t just open a café and chill.” One mistake can mean changing the whole setup the next day.
A regular tells of coming in after a long stretch away and wanting something she had eaten before but couldn’t name. She began describing it, and “she knew it”. That was the day she asked Pranali’s name. She also tells of the Berliner her son liked that had come off the menu. Pranali put one together for him anyway and asked for advance notice so she could make it happen next time. “It’s not service or training. She remembered my son liked that one.”
And so it is for most of the regulars at Padaria. If someone has come in more than twice, she pays closer attention. Not to their names, necessarily, but to their orders. Her reasoning is that “if someone feels special, just walking in, it’s a +1; they will come back.”
All of the tiny tables inside come with an unrestricted view of the counter. And it’s hard not to notice how good she is at this. Like the coffee order she’s already called to the barista as she sees you walk up to the door. It’s who she is; she says, “I like knowing details. Everyone is so different; it’s very interesting.” Her sister Sonali, an HR consultant in Dubai, told us that Pranali’s warmth and attention to detail “aren’t things she switches on professionally.”
that’s just me
To a first-time visitor, the same regular says Pranali can seem like “a no-nonsense kind of person who’s very efficient.”
You’d think Pranali’s bossgirl ways come very naturally to her. But the calm efficiency that everyone sees is something she’s painstakingly built. She says she was “a little shy before”, anxious and prone to overthinking. Work was where she went to get out of her own head. “That’s why I liked being at work, because then I overthink everything. I did the work to not let everything affect me.” And it’s reached beyond the counter too. An argument with her mother used to end with her in tears. Now she talks it through.
Praise still takes her by surprise. When we asked her to talk to us for this piece, she spent ten minutes completely confused: “Are you sure you want to talk to me?” She rang Sonali, who is always the first person she calls, and said she didn’t think she was good enough to be profiled. Sonali told her to do it.
underneath it all
She’s seen Padaria grow from a handful of daily customers to 300, sometimes 400 people a day, and grown alongside it. Sometimes it is ten hours of non-stop traffic. Ralph, she says, sets a very high standard and she’s learnt a lot from him.
And she’s learnt what not to do elsewhere. She’s worked 12 – 14 hours in places that turned around and said long hours are the job. So when staff at Padaria put in extra hours, she makes sure they go home early the next day.
She’s also grown up observing. Pranali’s father owned a restaurant in Baga, a tourist hotspot with the highest concentration of restaurants, shacks, pubs and bars in Goa. The restaurant opened for breakfast and stayed open until the wee hours. Her father would come home at 3 AM and was back at work by 8 AM. She says she learned how to navigate chaos from him.
The restaurant was shut when her father died. She was 14. Her mother worked in interior design, and no one could run it. Pranali, who was very close to her father, was devastated. “If maybe I was really grown up, I wouldn’t let them shut the restaurant. But I was a kid.”
Her older sister was away, studying, so for a long time it was just Pranali and her mum, and she says the relationship “fully shifted”. When she could have trained outside Goa, she chose not to. “I didn’t leave Goa because my mum would be alone.” Her mother has never said no to anything, and she traces her appetite for risk to her mum encouraging her to find her happiness in whatever she chooses to do: “I’m just like, okay, we’ll figure it out. Something will happen.” Her mother does want her to get married: “I’m on my own trip. I want to open a restaurant.”
a little something refreshing
What would her own place look like, we ask. Something very small, she says: “a cosy vibe with one speciality thing, which they come for, and definitely coffee.” But that’s a while away, she says.
She’s learned a lot from Padaria, but not everything because “I’m always in the front.” She wants to learn parts of the business she hasn’t been able to master from behind the counter. And she wants a harder kitchen to learn it in. As much as she loves Padaria, she says she’s reached the upper limit and is in her comfort zone. “I need to up my game to something else.”
no doubt
As of publishing, she’s handed in her notice at Padaria. Colleagues have been working on her to stay; the door, she says, stays open for her. The sweetest thing, though, is the calls from regulars. When she’s off sick, they ask for her number: “Why haven’t you come? Are you okay?” They want to catch up for lunch or dinner before she leaves; something, she says, has never happened in any other job.
Her plan is two years out. She’ll take a “much-needed break” before she goes to live with Sonali in Dubai, where her mother spends much of the year. Then she’ll find her way back to the idea that has followed her since she was 14. Her father’s restaurant, which she was too young to save. “But now, for his sake, I want to open something.”
