How a Father's Sunday Pav Bhaji Became the Dish That Held His Family Together

Some family food traditions get written down in a recipe box. Others live entirely in memory, tied to one specific night of the week and one specific person standing at the stove.

For chef Aditya “Adi” Kangutkar, that night was Sunday, and that person was his father, Milind, cooking the same beloved street food back home in India for years on end.

Sunday Nights Meant One Specific Dish

Growing up in India, Kangutkar has described Sunday dinners as something he genuinely looked forward to, because they meant his father was in charge of the kitchen. The dish that came to define those nights was pav bhaji, a popular Indian street food built from a rich, spiced vegetable mash served alongside butter-toasted bread rolls.

It wasn’t a dish reserved for special occasions. It was simply what Sunday meant in that household, repeated often enough that the smell and the routine became inseparable from the day itself.

The Cooking Itself Was a Shared Activity

What made the ritual stick wasn’t only the food, but how it got made. Father and son would watch cooking shows together beforehand, then try out new ideas for that week’s version of dinner, turning the meal into something they planned together rather than something that simply appeared on the table.

Kangutkar has pointed to peeling potatoes and picking cilantro leaves for garnish as some of his strongest childhood memories from that kitchen. The prep work itself, not just the finished plate, became part of what he remembers most clearly.

Other Families Built the Same Kind of Ritual

Kangutkar’s story isn’t an isolated case among chefs who grew up watching their fathers cook. Chef Remi Chevallier has described his father’s veal blanquette as a dish reserved specifically for Sundays, made especially when grandparents, cousins, and other relatives came together for family gatherings.

Chef Abhishek Botadkar has a nearly identical Sunday memory built around Bombay goat keema pav, recalling his father bringing home fresh bread from the neighborhood bakery while the family gathered around the television and the dish simmered. Chef Gustavo Pinet has described a similar pattern with breakfast tacos, where most Sundays followed the same easy rhythm of sleeping in and sharing a meal together before the day slowed down.

The Dish Outlasted Childhood

The pav bhaji tradition didn’t stay confined to Kangutkar’s childhood home. As an adult working as executive chef at Twin Tails, he recently made the dish again for a staff meal, and the effect was immediate.

He’s said it instantly brought back those memories of cooking with his father. A dish that started as a weekly household routine turned into something he could recreate decades later and still feel the same connection it carried the first time around.

What Made a Weekly Ritual Leave This Much of a Mark

None of these stories involve anything elaborate. A vegetable mash, a braised veal dish, spiced minced meat, breakfast tacos, none of it required special equipment or rare ingredients.

What they share is repetition and presence: the same person, the same day, the same dish, often enough that it stopped being a meal and became something closer to an anchor point for an entire family. That kind of consistency, more than any single recipe, seems to be what turns Sunday cooking into a memory that lasts decades.