Vik Menon is a tea lover.
Hot or cold, it doesn’t matter. Vik loves tea. But it’s real tea (or chai as it is known in India) that he loves. Not a powder. Not something instant. He loves real brewed chai.
Unfortunately, the Mountain Top resident couldn’t find the tea he craved anywhere locally.
“We didn’t have anything here in our area for getting snacks or some authentic tea,” he said. “The only thing I could find locally was a chai latte,” he lamented. “I don’t call that chai or a tea. It was not a tea, just something like a tea,” he related. “I was forced to go to New York to get real chai.”
Growing tired of traveling to New York for what he described as real chai, he decided to do something about it.
“I felt there are probably many people around here like me who are looking to get authentic chai,’ he said. “I thought okay, let’s do some research. Make sure we get all the stuff we need to make the tea here. I didn’t want to use instant powder. That would have been easy but not for me.”
The result was Chaiwala – The Tea Spot, a cozy new restaurant he owns at 726 Wilkes-Barre Township Blvd.
To make sure that his chai is authentic, the almost all the ingredients for his chai is imported from India. “We use all the real stuff we use to make the tea,” he said. “There are no preservatives, no instant stuff.”
As an example, Menon said he and his staff use real tea leaves to make tea. “We boil the leaves in water, add milk and boil it again for four or five minutes,” he explained. The same process goes into making coffee the Chiwala offers in addition to chai. The Indian coffee is filtered drop by drop. It takes three to four minutes for the coffee to drip down, but you get the real taste that comes from the coffee beans,” he noted.
Open just a few weeks, Chaiwala has been a hit. “The business has been doing good. People are excited,” said the 33-year-old Menon who also owns Mountaintop Beverage near the Triangle in Mountain Top. He purchased the beer distributorship just about a year ago from Wychock Beverage.
“Whoever comes in they are saying, ‘we were waiting for something like this for a long time’,” he related. Many customers, he said, are those outside the Indian community.
Menon said one recent customer, a man almost 80 years old, was nearly in tears when he was served the authentic chai and Indian cookie. “I was nostalgic for him. He said it brought him back to his college days,” Menon explained.
Besides tea and coffee, Chaiwala offers fresh fruit drinks with no additives and a variety of shakes, all made with fresh fruit like banana, mango, strawberry or dates.
Additionally, Menon is excited about Chaiwala’s tempting food menu which gives customers the opportunity to try authentic Indian foods made to order with all natural ingredients.
The most popular item on his menu is the Bombay sandwich which consists of three layers with a variety of vegetables between slices of bread, topped with cheese and grilled.
Another popular offering is the ice cream sandwich, a three-layer dish consisting of layers of pineapple, cheese and, of course, ice cream.
An enticing menu item is pani puri, a deep-fried breaded hollow shell about one inch in diameter that is filled with a combination of finely diced potato, onion, peas and chickpeas. Menon pointed out his restaurant is the only one in the area that offers five different flavors of water which is dripped into the shell to give the snack different flavors.
The menu also includes Maggie, a type of Indian noodle served in a variety of ways. It’s available plain, with Masala, cheese, vegetables, or egg and vegetables.
Another snack is muska-bun, or simply a bun with butter. The bun can be served with just butter or with a fruit gel that Menon and his staff make right in the restaurant from fresh fruit.
