Candy Shop Near Me in Euston: Ambala's Original Drummond Street Mithai Counter

Ambala's original shop sits at 112-114 Drummond Street, a short walk from the Euston station concourse, and it opens every day from 10am to 10pm. It is not a pick-and-mix sweet shop. It is London's best-known mithai counter, the Indian sweets of milk, sugar, nuts and gram flour, and four pieces of motichoor ladoo cost £4.20 on Ambala's own online shop. For a candy shop near me search around Euston, it is the most interesting answer.

Ambala's own timeline credits Mohammed Ali Khan, who started making sweets in High Holborn in 1964 and founded the business in 1965. He named it after Ambala, the town in India where he was born. The first shop opened here on Drummond Street in NW1, and from that single counter the company grew into a chain of shops across the UK. The name on the fascia is the name of a hometown.

The ownership has changed recently. In May 2025 Cakebox PLC bought Ambala Foods, which at the time ran 22 UK stores, according to the advisers who handled the deal. The website footer now reads Cake Box. For a visitor, the practical effect is small so far: the Drummond Street shop is still listed on the official site with its own store page, daily hours and in-store pickup for online orders.

Motichoor ladoo is the place to start. These are bright orange balls of tiny fried gram-flour pearls bound with syrup, soft rather than crunchy, and the special ladoo is sold in boxes of four, nine or eighteen pieces, from £4.20 for four. They are very sweet, so four is plenty for two people trying them for the first time. Ask for a box rather than a bag if you are carrying them any distance.

Chocolate barfi is the friendliest choice for anyone new to mithai. It is a fudge-like milk sweet layered with chocolate, sold from £4.50 for five pieces. Special pera, a dense, lightly caramelised milk sweet, starts at £3.75 for four pieces and is the cheapest box on the online menu. If you are buying for a group, the mixed mithai tin starts at £5.80 for four pieces and saves you choosing.

A word on keeping them. Milk-based sweets such as barfi, pera and rasmalai are fresh products, not shelf-stable candy, so they belong in the fridge once you get home and are best eaten within a few days. Gram-flour ladoo hold up a little longer at room temperature. If you are buying a box as a gift for a Diwali visit, buy it the day before rather than a week ahead, and keep it cool.

Autumn is Ambala's busiest season. Diwali falls in early November in 2026, and the homepage is already pushing pre-orders for festival boxes. In the days before Diwali the Drummond Street counter gets long queues of families buying large boxes for visits and gifts, and staff work through them steadily rather than quickly. A weekday morning soon after 10am is the calmest time to go.

If you know what you want, order online and choose in-store pickup at Euston. Collection means you skip the browsing queue and pick up a packed box. If the line is out of the door on a Saturday close to Diwali, and you only want a few pieces, it is honestly better to come back on a weekday than to wait thirty minutes for a four-piece box.

Drummond Street runs right alongside Euston station, and the stretch around Ambala is one of London's long-standing South Asian food streets, with vegetarian canteens, grocers and sweet counters. It makes a good pre-train detour: eat a cheap lunch, then buy a box of sweets to take north. The street is short, so you can walk its length in five minutes and see what is open.

Who you meet at the counter depends on the hour. Late morning brings office workers from around Euston Road and travellers dragging suitcases. In the evenings, especially before festivals, it is families buying in bulk and older customers who have been coming for decades and order by name without looking at the trays. Watch what they point at; the regulars rarely pick the most decorated tray.

One small counter habit helps. Mithai is chosen by the box size first and the variety second, so decide whether you want four, nine or a larger box before you reach the front. Staff fill the box from the trays as you point, and mixed boxes are normal. Saying the box size up front keeps the line moving and gets you a neatly packed box.

For something to do with your box of sweets, the Wellcome Collection at 183 Euston Road is a short walk east. It is a free museum about health and the human body, with a café and a reading room, and it suits a rainy afternoon. Beyond it, the walk along Euston Road leads towards King's Cross, so you can link two stations on foot with a stop for sweets in between.

If you prefer British-style sweets in jars rather than mithai, Ambala is not that kind of shop, and that is fine; London has both traditions. Treat the visit as a different kind of candy shop, one built around festivals and family gifts rather than childhood nostalgia, and the long queue before Diwali starts to make sense.

Ambala Euston, 112-114 Drummond Street, London NW1 2HN. Open daily 10am to 10pm, according to the official store page. Nearest stations: Euston, plus Euston Square on the Underground. No phone number is published on the store page, so use the website for orders and in-store pickup. Prices quoted are from ambala.co.uk in October 2026. Rasmalai is collection in-store only, and Diwali pre-orders are open now.