The motto of this restaurant, part of a small chain of New Jersey-based fast-casual Indian shops owned by Shudh Parkash Singh, is "food for every mood," and that's accurate, unless you are in the mood for meat. The savory foods menu is a playful romp through the crispiest, crunchiest spicy-sweet snacks and breads you may never have tasted before.
The attractive, contemporary room has two focal points: the kitchen, behind glass but in full view, and the case of impossibly colorful Indian sweets adjacent to the cash register. The deli counter is a psychedelic museum of Indian sweets, or mithai, where simple ingredients like flour, nuts and clarified butter become bursts of bright colors and geometric shapes. But this Hicksville spot goes even further with the savory street snacks known as chaat.
The savory foods menu is a playful romp through the crispiest, crunchiest spicy-sweet snacks and breads you may never have tasted before. Since few of them cost more than $10, misfires aren't painful. Mithaas' menu mines multiple regions -- north, south, Mumbai, the border with China (for a raft of Indo-Manchurian dishes) -- but doesn't stray from the street-food ethos.
Flatbread and crepes reign supreme here, from papery roti, to dosas, to pancake-like uttapam. The cheese uttapam is akin to an Indian quesadilla: melted mozzarella oozing from between sour rice-flour crepes you'll drag through sambar, an earthy lentil curry that comes with many breads.
Chefs in an open kitchen dab yogurts and green chutneys onto delicate globes of puffed semolina wheat in the sev puri dahi puri (SPDP) until the plate looks wilder than a Jackson Pollock painting.
Even a thali meal, a staple of South Indian cuisine, appears postmodern with its inflated domes of housemade fry bread. But make sure to ask for it with puri, or else you'll have to soak up the silken vegetarian dips with regular flatbread.
The menu here has no descriptions to accompany the stunning variety of dosas, parathas, Indo-Chinese noodles and Jain meals, but the staff at Mithaas is helpful and accommodating.