Dave Malhotra comes from a mixed religious background. His mother is Roman Catholic, and father, Punjabi. But when it came to choosing an accompaniment to eat curry or rajma with, he’d lean to his mother’s culinary tradition of turning to pao [Portuguese for bread]. “As a kid, I would eat everything with pao. Even when I was studying abroad, it was easiest to buy gravy and eat it with pao. And travelling across the world introduced me to how bread tasted wonderful with different fillings,” says Malhotra, 37.