Tucked onto Drummond Street near Euston Station — a stretch long known as London's original 'Little India' — Gupta's has been frying jalebi and pressing barfi since 1979. The shop was started by Jagdish Prasad and Chandtara Gupta, who moved from India and built the business from scratch, and it now sits in the hands of the third generation: parents Rikki and Rakhi run the day-to-day, while children Rushika and Ruchir handle the digital side.
The shop's specialty is mithai, the umbrella term for Indian sweets, all made from recipes handed down through the family. The line-up runs from jalebi — the deep-fried, syrup-soaked spirals so iconic that Jason Derulo wrote a song about them — to fudge-like barfi and motichoor ladoo, small orange balls that Rushika says are best eaten hot.
Diwali is the shop's busiest stretch of the year by far. Rushika describes a family rhythm familiar to anyone raised above the family shop: working the counter all day, then celebrating at home afterwards with food, cards and diyas lit for the festival of light. But you don't need a festival as an excuse. Off-season, her personal picks are soan papdi — a crunchy, brownie-sized sweet she likens to shortbread — motichoor ladoo, and samosas with the shop's tamarind chutney.
Gupta's has also grown beyond its original counter. There are now branches in Hendon and Kingsbury, plus a street food truck at Spitalfields Market serving proper lunch fare: pani puri, aloo papri chaat and samosa chaat.
Drummond Street itself is worth the detour. Since the 1960s it has been lined with independent sweet shops, vegetarian restaurants and grocers feeding generations of Londoners — a compact, genuinely historic pocket of Indian food culture a two-minute walk from Euston. If you're passing through the station, it's one of the better quick stops in the area, and everything boxes up nicely as a gift, which is rather the point: as Rushika puts it, mithai is what you give people you love.
For travellers, this is the kind of story that turns a functional station stop into a proper eating detour. Come hungry, order a mixed box, and walk the street while you're at it.
