Maharaja Sweet Shop in Jackson Heights

In 2020, I began teaching an Indian food, blogging and photography class at Willliams College, Massachusetts. At each session, students prepared a protein, lentil, vegetable, and bread or rice dish. We concluded the class by sitting around a table, talking and eating all the delicious food prepared.

The class included a Jackson Heights restaurant tour and we observed two chef’s – from Drunken Munkey and Rahi – demonstrate their cooking skills. Below are some of my student’s blog posts.  

I knew from the moment that we walked into the restaurant that it would be my favorite of our class’s Jackson Heights food tour. As we passed through the entryway of Maharaja Sweets, my attention was immediately drawn to the long glass case bursting with multi-colored sweets. As we eagerly waited for a table, our group watched as various customers selected assortments of sweets and admired the wide variety of colors and textures that filled the square white boxes with which they departed a few minutes later. 

After we were seated, the first dish that I sampled was not, in fact, something from the glass case; rather, when we were served Dahi Puri––a semolina and wheat flour shell filled with sweet yogurt chutneys (such as coriander, tamarind, and red chili), lentils, and black chickpeas––I learned that Maharaja Sweets also specializes in chaat (street food). Because the dahi puri is a delicate shell filled with liquid, it must be eaten both immediately and in one bite, or else it will either become soggy or the contents will spill. As I discovered, this is indeed the best method of consumption: it guarantees the perfect mixture of sweetness, tanginess, and spiciness.

I immediately declared the dahi puri to be my favorite of the dishes that we had sampled that day, but I should not have been so quick to do so. Just a few minutes later, our table received Gulab Jamuns: soft, doughy balls made with dried milk solids that are deep fried and dipped in rose-cardamom flavored sugar syrup. Like the dahi puri, they must be eaten quickly, while warm, or they will become mushy. It was denser in texture than a doughnut, and the notes of cardamom and rose lightened the flavor to a delicate sweetness. Because its notes of cardamom and rose offered the perfect amount of sweetness to end any meal, I thought that the gulab jamun would undoubtedly be the restaurant’s best seller.

However, as the owner Sukhdev Bawa explained, while it is one of the most popular dishes that he serves, another dish is actually the most popular: they sell over 1,000 pounds annually of Malai Chum Chum, a white sweet made from paneer and condensed milk. They often ship this dessert to customers across the country overnight in order to preserve its freshness. As I took my first bite, I was also able to taste the reason why he believes his restaurant is so successful: the ingredients are of the highest quality. In a dish such as malai chum chum, whose flavor depends on a few key ingredients, the quality is those ingredients is everything.

Not only does Mr. Bawa work to ensure the quality of the ingredients, but he also prepares and supervises the creation of all the sweets, which he grew up making in his parent’s sweet shop in India. When he moved to Brooklyn over thirty five years ago, he never planned to open a similar establishment in the United States, but he eventually realized that it was in his destiny to do so. Yet, when he opened the all-vegetarian sweet and chaat restaurant in 2000, some doubted his ability to succeed because there were few vegetarians at the time. Nevertheless, he received a hugely positive response upon opening, and the restaurant has remained a delicious place for sweets and chaat in the decades since and is sure to remain just as popular in those yet to come.

Kendall Allen is currently a senior majoring in Sociology and Gender Studies at Williams College in Williamstown, MA. Outside of the classroom, she can be found working as a campus tour guide, chopping vegetables for Log Lunch (a weekly vegetarian lunch and lecture sponsored by the Center for Environmental Studies), and running her food instagram: @kendallinthekitchen. Although she does not yet know what her future holds, she hopes that she will continue to be surrounded by plenty of good food––and even better company.