Almost every culture has a toast with an ingredient fried in it. According to Lakhan Jethani, chef partner at Bandra’s Izakaya-style Japanese restaurant Mizu, the Japanese sando is made of shokupan milk bread and became popular in the 1900s as part of yoshoku or Western influenced Japanese cuisine.

“You cook down a slurry on a pan and then put it into the bread dough to make it chewy. Today, chefs are recreating childhood food memories and packing them into sandos — from pork cutlets to wagyu, with a slather of bulldog sauce,” says Jethani, adding that it was the Michelin chefs in Japan who made the concept spread across the whole world.