You are in Mumbai and if you haven't tasted the Pav, you actually missed to taste the real Mumbai food. Be it Pav Bhaji, Vada Pav, Misal Pav, Keema Pav etc. Pav has quite an amazing history here which actually braught to Indian shore by Portuguese.
As Lizzie Collingham points out in her authoritative Curry – A Biography, the Portuguese landed in parts of India (Cochin, Goa etc.) where the locals ate rice. But they missed their crusty bread, and in any case, they needed bread for Holy Communion. They could find wheat flour in Goa but yeast was hard to come by. So they started using a few drops of toddy to ferment the dough and created the various Goan breads we know today: the round gutli, the flat pav, etc.
It is from Goa that bread first travelled to Bombay and became a staple among locals. By the time British arrived with their nasty white bread, the Portuguese-Goan pav had already been well-established. And so British bread became an upmarket sort of dish, useful for making toast or sandwiches. But the food of the streets used pav, which could be sliced open to stuff an omelette into it or served alongside a spicy keema or a korma. And Bombay’s Goan community continued to use it as an alternative to rice.
