Celebrate Diwali with us in Espoo

Meet Archana – The Heart Behind Pav Paradise

Archana's story isn't about a chef who always knew she'd run a food business.

It's about an ordinary girl with an extraordinary dream.

Born to a Malayali family and raised in the bustling streets of Pune, Maharashtra, Archana spent nine years in the world of software engineering at Wipro. But behind the lines of code, there was always the quiet aroma of spices and fresh bread in her mind — a love for cooking that friends and family swore had "magic" in it.

When she moved to Finland, she was excited to explore a new country, but there was one thing she couldn't find — the soft, fluffy, melt-in-the-mouth Pav she grew up with. Without it, the street food she loved felt incomplete.

So, in her small Helsinki kitchen, she began an experiment. Different flours, different yeast, different baking times — hundreds of trials, dozens of failures, and countless nights when the oven was still warm at midnight. Six months later, she pulled out a batch that tasted exactly like home.

Since then, Archana has baked more than 10,000 Pav, each one carrying a little bit of that same passion. Today, she runs a thriving cloud kitchen, serving authentic Pav-based street food across Helsinki. But her dream is bigger — to take Pav Paradise beyond Finland and make authentic Indian Pav a household name across Europe.

Because sometimes, the most extraordinary journeys begin in the most ordinary kitchens.