The real architect of Paragon's success

Editor’s note: Paragon was ranked #5 in Taste Atlas’ 100 most legendary restaurants in the world in 2024. The Kozhikode establishment’s meteoric success is associated with men of the Govind family. Govind Panchikail and PM Valsan who founded what was once a small bakery in 1939—and current owner Sumesh Govind whose bold innovation turned Paragon into a global icon. 

Lost to memory is his mother Saraswati—who kept Paragon alive after her husband’s early death. A single mother who sat behind the counters and ran the restaurant—surviving a mountain of debt, eviction notices and the societal burden of being the rare woman restaurateur in a traditional small town. She kept Paragon going until her willful teenage son grew up—and finally laid claim to his father’s legacy. 

This excerpt from ‘India’s Most Legendary Restaurants’—edited by Ruth Dsouza Prabhu—is an overdue acknowledgement to her part in Paragon’s storied history.

This has been published with permission from Aleph Book Company.

The year was 1939. Govindan Panchikail, Sumesh’s paternal grandfather, had retired from the Indian Railways. With time on his hands to now follow his culinary passions, he opened a bakery in Kozhikode with his son, PM Valsan, christening it Paragon. The story goes that a high-ranking British official and his wife were good friends with Govindan. It was this official’s wife who suggested the name Paragon Baking Company—perhaps foreseeing the legacy that could be built.

The bakery became the go-to place for Kozhikode residents looking for flaky puffs, indulgent Christmas cakes, and other baked goods. ‘People would come from

as far as Trivandrum and Kochi to buy from us. We also had a small restaurant attached to the bakery which served a few signature dishes like mutton chops curry paired with bread and Kerala’s famous combination of appam with vegetable or mutton stew,’ reminisces Sumesh.

Sumesh’s memories of his grandfather are faint, but he tells me that his father took charge of Paragon soon after Govindan’s passing. ‘The restaurant did well with my father at the helm, and he chose to expand into other businesses. He married my mother, Saraswati Valsan, and I was born in 1963,’ he says. However, the diversification did not go as planned and Valsan incurred huge losses which immensely affected his morale.

Sumesh’s family ploughed on, surviving the best they could despite the financial pressures they were under. He believes that the strain took a toll on his father who passed away in 1978, when Sumesh was only fifteen years old. Despite her grief, Saraswati, Sumesh’s mother, was sure that she wanted to carry Paragon’s legacy forward. No small task, considering small-town Kozhikode (like most other places) back then was quite averse to having women at the forefront of a business. The pride and respect for what his mother lived through and achieved during those tough years is evident as Sumesh tells me of those times.

‘You have to remember that Paragon was not a fine-dining restaurant, but a typical Malayali one, and my mother must have been among the first ladies in

Kozhikode to take over such a business.’ Saraswati would sit at the cash counter and supervise every aspect of the restaurant’s workings. She carried on relentlessly despite the disapprobation of society and even members of the family being unhappy about it.

As for Sumesh, he was at that time a typical teenager, no longer kept in check by a strict father. ‘I had the time of my life,’ he says. ‘Rather than helping out, I was part

of the problem for my mother.’ Saraswati was battling several issues—the loss of her husband, the growing pains of a teenager, running a restaurant with the everyday rigmarole of staff issues, customer complaints, and more. She was also tackling the burden of debt and dealing with a judgemental society. At one point, she was faced with eviction when a large part of the Paragon building was acquired by the government for building a flyover. The staff who had been with the business for close to forty years went on strike against the acquisition, posing significant hurdles for the restaurant. Their protest continued until a solution was arrived at. 

‘My mother was constantly between the devil and the deep blue sea, but she handled it all well,’ Sumesh says with respect and admiration. 

A teenager during those turbulent years, Sumesh saw only chaos and didn’t want to have anything to do with the restaurant. When he completed his commerce degree, he stated emphatically that Paragon was not his cup of tea. ‘Like most youngsters, I believed I was a genius at philosophy, literature, art, movie critiquing—all subjects I was interested in and completely into,’ he chuckled. But there came a time when the family was up against the wall. The debts continued to linger, and the restaurant’s prospects had grown stagnant. The question arose: should Sumesh sell the restaurant and use that money to follow his passion or should he step in and try to fix things?

To find the answer, he turned to his spiritual guru. ‘It is in your karma that you have to get into the family business. Do what is in your hands right now, and then work on becoming what you like later,’ his guru had guided Sumesh. ‘This advice made sense to me. Here I was, not doing what was in front of me and what was needed of me, instead wanting to go into literature and the like. I understood that I needed to walk the talk before I do anything else, and so I decided to take matters into my own hands.’