Pav Bhaji with Extra Butter is the deliberately indulgent register of the Mumbai dish: extra butter is melted across the top of the bhaji and used generously to toast the pav, pushing the whole plate toward richness. The angle is excess as a feature, not a flaw. Where the classic form uses a measured amount of fat and lets lemon and raw onion keep the dish bright, this version leans the other way on purpose. Butter is the headline, and the stall often signals it visibly by mounting a thick pat or a sculpted slab on the hot mash so it slumps and pools as it reaches the table.
The underlying bhaji is the same spiced vegetable mash, potatoes, tomatoes, and mixed vegetables cooked down on the tawa with pav bhaji masala, but the butter discipline is intentionally abandoned at two points. First, the pav is toasted in a far heavier slick of butter, the cut faces almost frying rather than merely crisping. Second, more butter is folded into the bhaji at the finish and then a final visible quantity is melted over the top. Good execution still demands balance underneath the richness: the bhaji itself must be properly cooked and seasoned so the butter amplifies a real base rather than smothering an underdeveloped one, and the eater's lemon and raw onion still have to do their cutting work or the plate turns heavy and one-note. Sloppy versions hide a thin, raw-tasting mash under the fat, leave the pav greasy and soggy instead of crisp because it sat in butter without enough heat, or skip the acid entirely so nothing counters the load.
The plating telegraphs the intent: a glossy, butter-slicked bowl of bhaji with a melting cap of butter, raw onion, cilantro, lemon, and pav whose toasted faces glisten. It is the same dish as the classic, dialed up one specific dimension, and that single-axis exaggeration is exactly what separates it from the standard, the griddled stuffed-roll, and the cheese treatments, each of which deserves its own article rather than being crowded in here.