Visiting a South Asian sweet shop during Diwali is a joyous and chaotic experience. Lines trail out the door. Employees furiously pack ornate boxes containing laddoos enriched with ghee, spongy rasgula and all manner of colourful sweets, often made with dairy, sugar and nuts and sometimes topped with a layer of edible silver foil.
Friends and relatives meet around the display cases by happenstance, exchanging good wishes. Diwali, which will be celebrated within South Asia and among its diaspora on October 24 this year, commemorates the triumph of light over darkness. Central to that celebration is mithai, or sweets. Mass-produced mithai are readily available online, but these five independent shops make their sweets by hand every day, offering their local South Asian communities a taste of the familiar. Diwali is their prime time.
When Sukhdev Bawa immigrated to New York in 1981, his first job was driving a taxi. “My wife thought it was too dangerous,” he said. So he switched over to the sweets business, working for two other shops before starting his own. At Maharaja Sweets, which he opened on a busy stretch of Jackson Heights, Queens, in 2000, he prepares snacks like mathi, deep-fried dough rounds that can be sweet or savoury.
Bawa’s employees travel to India frequently to bring back ideas for regional sweets to add to the menu, like anarkali, a Bengali sweet filled with cherry and pistachio, and rose bahar, squares filled with rose-flavoured sugar.
Maharaja sells about 80 different kinds of sweets. And while some shops use shortcuts, like milk powder, to produce such large quantities of mithai, Bawa prefers to use fresh milk: “We get the proper taste.”
Before she opened Punjab Sweets in Kent, Washington, in 2001, Iqbal Dha, the owner, said she used to drive more than three hours to Canada to buy mithai like besan burfi, which is made with chickpea flour, and milk cake, which is prepared by cooking milk down to a thicker consistency and mixing it with sugar.
Dha, wearing a colourful salwar kameez alongside her employees, learned to cook from her mother, and from preparing meals for langar, a Sikh tradition that provides free communal meals to anyone who needs one. She’s particular about what she eats, she said. “If I go to any wedding parties, I never eat because I don’t like it,” she said. “I like my food. I always eat at Punjabi Sweets. My employees, too.”
Her kitchen staff is made up entirely of women.
She shut down indoor dining during the pandemic, but hopes to have it back up and running soon. Like many mithai shops, Punjab Sweets is a watering hole for the local Desi community. “People are calling me at home, saying, ‘We miss Punjabi Sweets,’” Dha said.
“People have been buying from here since they were kids,” she said.
Jayasri Sweets in Herndon, Virginia, is known for its kaja, a flaky, deep-fried pastry from Andhra Pradesh. It is a specialty of the owner, Jayasri Gampa, who shapes the dough every day the shop is open. You won’t find the regional confection at many other mithai shops in the United States. Her version is glazed on the outside and crunchy with sugar on the inside.
“People even started taking it back home to India to show them how the American kaja is,” said Gampa’s husband, Dilipkumar, who helps run the business. “It has become that popular.”
The family opened Brij Mohan in 2005. Sohan Lal Gaba, an owner, said that when he moved to the United States, the quality of milk, sugar and chickpea flour was much different than what he was used to in India. “There was no one to teach me about the ingredients and everything here,” he said. “I just figured it out myself, what I can do with available ingredients.”
He has grown accustomed to using cow’s milk instead of buffalo milk, for example, in sweets like the shop’s bestselling slabs of milk cake, and sandwich gulab jamun filled with sweetened milk solids.
Surati Farsan Mart has continually expanded its offerings — which include cashew-based kaju katli and coconut-rich kopra pak — to meet the demand of the growing population of South Asian Americans in Artesia, California. During Diwali, staff deck out the shop with lights and decorations.
“We have probably 20 hour days for about two weeks,” said Ashvin Patel, the owner. He hires security to do crowd control. “It is crazy. The adrenaline kicks in.”
Patel’s parents, Ramila and Nathu, started the shop in 1986 after immigrating from Leicester, England. Patel now runs the place, and has focused on modernising the store’s design and expanding its online presence.
While traditional sweets like kaju katli are the top sellers at the shop, Patel also offers more contemporary varieties — like green- and pink-hued watermelon burfi made with pistachios, cashews and raisins shaped to look like the fruit — to keep up with the innovation that is already happening in India.
“They are probably even more advanced than we are when it comes to fusion ideas,” he said.
When it comes to mithai, freshness is everything, Patel said. Surati’s confections — like sweet, fudgy rolls flavoured with almonds and pistachios — are made every two days, and hot, syrup-soaked jalebi are made every day. Patrons ask him about opening other locations, but Patel doesn’t want to. “You stretch yourself thin, and the quality and the service would suffer.”
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