Getting Food From Mithaas Restaurant Jersey City Without Wasting Your Evening
I learned about Mithaas through a coworker who swore by their biryani, so I drove over from Hoboken on a Friday night with three people and zero reservations. That was my first mistake. The second was assuming their menu was static. It changes seasonally, and the kitchen often runs out of the popular items before 8 PM. If you want naan that isn't rock-hard and chicken that actually tastes marinated instead of boiled, you need to show up between 5:30 and 6:45, or order through their app and pick up rather than sit. It is a casual Indian-Pakistani spot on Newark Avenue with a menu that runs about 80 items across tandoori, biryani, karahi, and vegetarian thalis. The pricing sits in the mid-range for the area — entrees run $14 to $24, biryanis $16 to $20, and naan is $2.50 to $4 depending on whether it is plain, garlic, or something with paneer stuffed inside. The place seats roughly 45 indoors and they do not take reservations for parties larger than four. Delivery through DoorDash and Uber Eats is available but their own website offers a 10% discount on pickup orders, which matters because the wait times on third-party apps are consistently 20 to 30 minutes longer than ordering direct. The kitchen runs on a single pass line, which means every order — appetizer, main, dessert — moves through the same two stations. When the place fills up, the bottleneck is obvious. Appetizers like samosas and seekh kebabs take 12 to 15 minutes past the posted time, and biryani gets held because the rice batch is usually made in 10-kilo increments and they do not restart until the current one sells out. I once ordered a lamb chang subz at 7:20 PM on a Thursday and it arrived at 8:05 because the kitchen had just sold through their lamb reserve and was pulling from a secondary batch that needed an extra 15 minutes of cooking time. That is not a complaint — it is just how small commercial kitchens operate when they do not inventory track in real time.
How to Order Correctly the First Time
Start with the app or the phone line, not the walk-in counter. The staff at the counter handles walk-ins and phone orders simultaneously, and by the time they process your order you have lost 10 minutes of kitchen queue position. Call ahead at 5:15 PM if you are coming at 6, and tell them exactly what you want. They will confirm availability and sometimes hold the item for 15 minutes if you are already en route. This works reliably for biryani and karahi dishes, less so for tandoori items because those are cooked to order and cannot really be prepped. When you arrive, do not ask for recommendations from the server unless you have already looked at the menu online. The floor staff here is polite but not trained on ingredient cross-contamination or spice levels beyond mild-medium-hot. If you have a gluten issue or a peanut allergy, you need to state it explicitly and ask to speak with the kitchen lead, who is usually the head cook and can actually trace ingredients. I spent 20 minutes negotiating with a floor manager about whether the paneer tikka was cooked in ghee or oil because the menu does not list cooking fats, and the answer turned out to be ghee for the marinade and oil for the grill. Nobody at the front desk knew this. The head cook did, once I asked specifically for him. For solo diners or couples, the lunch thali is the most reliable value — $12 on weekdays, includes rice, two vegetable options, one protein, and two naan. The catch is that the thali menu rotates daily, and the protein selection is usually limited to chicken, lamb, or chickpea. If you want fish, it is only available on weekends and only as a whole fried pomfret, which costs extra and requires you to eat around bones. I ate the pomfret once and found three intramuscular bones in a single serving, which is normal for whole fish but not mentioned on the menu anywhere.
Delivery vs Pickup: The Real Difference
Pickup is faster and cheaper, but the food arrives better only if you give the kitchen 20 minutes of buffer after your stated arrival time. I once picked up at exactly the agreed time and the biryani was still in the warmer, which meant the rice was dry and the meat was overcooked from holding. Waiting until 7:45 for a 7:30 pickup order made the difference between acceptable and good. The kitchen will accommodate this if you call and say you are five minutes away rather than showing up at the exact minute. Delivery through their own system uses a single driver for multiple nearby orders, which means your food sits in a insulated bag with whatever else is being delivered. I have had biryani arrive lukewarm because the driver made three stops before mine, and the naan arrived stale because it was sealed in a bag with a hot samosa and the steam made it soggy then dried out. Third-party apps solve this partially because drivers do not bundle orders the same way, but the markup eats the 10% pickup discount entirely. For a family of four spending $80 on food, the delivery fee and service charges add $25 to $30, so pickup is the mathematically correct choice unless you cannot leave the house.
Get the Full Details
Things They Do Not Tell You on the Website
The restaurant closes at 10 PM but the kitchen stops taking orders at 9:30. This is not posted anywhere visible, and I learned it the hard way when I walked in at 9:25 and was told they could not fulfill my order. The last bus leaves for the kitchen at 9:30, which means anything ordered after that point either does not get made or gets rushed through in a way that is noticeable. A karahi ordered at 9:28 will arrive undercooked because the chef is trying to clear the station before the closing shift change. They do not publish their supplier list, which matters if you care about where the lamb comes from. The meat is sourced from a local distributor in Elizabeth that supplies several South Asian restaurants in the area, and the quality is consistent but not premium. For comparison, the lamb at a place like Bombay Bazaar in Hoboken is noticeably tighter and leaner, but Bombay Bazaar charges 20% more and requires reservations. Mithaas is fine for weeknight dinners where you want consistent flavor without the fuss, but it is not the place to bring someone who talks about farm-to-table sourcing. The bathroom situation is also worth noting. There are two restrooms, one men's and one women's, and they are cleaned once per shift — typically at 3 PM and again at 10 PM. If you go between 6 PM and 9 PM, you are rolling the dice on cleanliness. I have seen the floors sticky and the sinks dry because the paper towel dispensers are not restocked during peak hours. Bring hand sanitizer.
When This Place Will Disappoint You
Weekend brunch on Saturday and Sunday between 11 AM and 2 PM is the worst window. The kitchen opens at 11, the menu is limited to breakfast items only, and they run out of parathas and halwa by noon. The seating is tight, the AC struggles against the summer heat, and the wait times for coffee are 15 minutes because they use a single expresso machine that is also making lattes for the crowd. I went once at 11:30 on a Sunday and left after 25 minutes because the line for the counter had not moved and nobody was taking phone orders. If you are allergic to cumin or coriander seeds, this is not the restaurant for you. Their base masala blend contains both, and there is no way to request a modification at the dish level. The kitchen uses the same spice mix for almost everything — biryani, karahi, tikka marinades, and the rice pilafs. I asked once if they could make a plain butter chicken without the spice blend, and the answer was no because the recipe is standardized and the cost of a separate batch for one order would be higher than the profit margin on the dish. They offered plain cream instead, which was edible but not what I wanted. Large parties of six or more will have a bad time unless you pre-order at least one day in advance. The kitchen does not have the capacity to handle eight individual orders simultaneously, and the staff will try to split your table across two checks and two shifts, which fragments the experience. I organized a birthday dinner for seven people and three of us waited 45 minutes for our food while the other four finished in 25 because the kitchen prioritized the smaller table. The manager comped our desserts, which was polite but did not fix the uneven pacing.
A Few Items Worth Skipping
The veg pulao is consistently average — the rice is overcooked, the vegetables are mushy, and the seasoning is flat. It is $11 and you could get a better biryani at half the price elsewhere. The gulab jamun dessert is also not worth it. It is served cold, which makes the syrup congeal on the surface, and the balls themselves are dense rather than spongy. The kitchen makes them fresh daily but does not have a reheating protocol, so they arrive in a state that is technically safe but not enjoyable. Skip it and order fresh fruit instead, which is $4 and actually fresh. The mutton korma is another item to avoid unless you like sweet. The recipe here leans heavily on sugar and cream, and the mutton is cut from the shoulder rather than the leg, which makes it fatty and stringy. I ordered it once thinking it would be similar to what I had in Karachi, and it was closer to a Americanized curry house version. The chicken korma is better because the breast meat is tender and the sauce is balanced, but even that is not exceptional.
The One Thing They Do Right
The seekh kebab is genuinely good. Ground lamb, onions, cilantro, and a hint of ginger garlic paste, grilled on skewers over charcoal. It costs $9 for two pieces and comes with a side of mint chutney that is actually spicy rather than watery. I have ordered this item at least 40 times over two years and it has never been inconsistent. The kitchen rotates the skewers at the right intervals, the meat stays juicy, and the char is present without being bitter. This is the item I recommend to anyone asking what to order, and it is the reason I keep going back despite all the friction points I described above. If you want the full experience, order the seekh kebab appetizer, a chicken karahi as your main, and skip the drinks because their soft drink selection is limited to Coke, Pepsi, Sprite, and Fanta in flavors that do not include lime or berry. The water is $1.50 and the mango lassi is $4, which is fairly priced. Everything else on the beverage menu is overpriced by about 40% compared to the food, which suggests the markup strategy here is food-competitive and drink-maximized.
