The unassuming Mobil station sits at a corner of suburbia marked Park Street NE and Maple Avenue East.

It’s all clean white paint, red brick and generic lettering reading “Food Mart.”

A few commuters driving through Vienna stand at the pumps, absent-mindedly filling their tanks. On this subfreezing day in late January, snow blankets the station’s gray roof.

I am sitting in a car outside, having just placed an online order for about $100 of Indian food from this place. I’m beginning to wonder if I’ve been duped. I mean, I grew up in Louisiana, so I’m no stranger to convenience store fare — but usually there’s some indication a kitchen lurks inside. Then I spy a small sign in one of the windows.

Chit Chaat Cafe. The Indian restaurant inside a gas station.

At least I’m in the right place. But that does not mean I’m in my right mind — at least judging from the look on my wife’s face.

I’ve dragged Maoria, our friend Lindsey and our dog, Stevie Nix, out of their cozy homes after hearing that some of the most inventive Indian cooking in the D.C. area could be had here.

A few stools run along one side of the gas station, but it generally operates as a takeout joint.

Which is why, after grabbing our order, my increasingly skeptical companions and I ended up brushing a half-foot of snow off a picnic table at a nearby park. The temperature, I regret to report, was 22 degrees — you know, 10 degrees below freezing.

If the food in these plastic containers didn’t deliver, I feared Maoria and Lindsey and Stevie Nix might have me trudge through the snow home to D.C.

My first bite into the crispy, kaleidoscopically flavorful samosa burrito flooded me with relief.

Oh, thank God. It was worth it.

It was insane. But it was worth it.

Chit Chaat Cafe’s food proved a balm that day. Every day, really, for those lucky enough to know it exists.

Vishal Sood, a software engineer, purchased the station — and the cafe in its womb — last year from Raja and Bindu Puri, who originally opened it in 2021. He hired Tahira Ehsan to helm the small kitchen (with the help of her husband, Amir) and to tinker with the existing menu.

The Ehsans had owned Indian restaurants on Capitol Hill and in McLean, which Amir ran as Tahira raised their family. Now, she says, it was her turn to work.

So much Indian food in the region is heavy, laden with cream and butter. Sood recently had a meal that anchored him into a 10-hour slumber. He wanted Chit Chaat to offer lighter, flavorful dishes.

No sleeping pills here (though there’s surely Zzzquil somewhere near the pharmacy aisle). The menu features a mix of the expected (butter chicken and dal makhani), street food favorites (pani puri) and inventive twists (Indian burritos). The adjective Sood repeatedly uses to describe Chit Chaat’s fare is “homestyle.” Which is true both in spirit and in reality. Tahira Ehsan does about half the prep and cooking — hand grinding the spices, sweating down the alliums and mashing them into an onion paste — at her home.

The results are warm, comforting and light without being slight. Replacing the cashew puree (in part because of her kids’ allergies) at the heart of the butter chicken — a standout — is a silky tomato-forward broth. Spice fiends may be left wanting, but I’m fond of the lovely sweetness balancing the dish.

It does, indeed, call to mind food made in a cozy home rather than an industrial kitchen.

Ditto the palak paneer. The thick, springy cubes of cheese rest in a hearty paste of spinach — not swimming in a bath of spinach-flavored cream, which has become far too common.

“You can eat our food and not feel bad about it the next day,” Sood says.

Like the kitchen, the menu is fairly small — but they’re always tinkering. They’ve recently added chicken samosas that sit in a small case in the station, grab-and-go style — and those are far better than the frightening hot dogs or stale Krispy Kreme you find in most convenience stores.

Chit Chaat’s particular brilliance is turning Punjabi cuisine into on-the-go fare. Behold the humble brilliance of the Indian burrito. The kitchen offers several — a butter chicken burrito, a paneer burrito, a lamb curry burrito — and all are worthy.

You want the samosa burrito. This is what staved off the hypothermia. This is what kept my blood from freezing. This is what Stevie Nix the pup got ZERO bites of, despite relentless begging.

Heaven (n.) — A flour tortilla stuffed with crispy potato samosas, chole masala (i.e., spicy chickpeas), tomatoes, onions, rice, and a mixture of sweet and spicy chutneys.

You’d think such a thing impossible, that it would fall apart in your hands, decorating the plate underneath in unappetizing mushy clumps. Instead, it’s surprisingly crispy and maintains its form to the last bite — which didn’t take me long to reach.

The key, Ehsan excitedly shows me some weeks later, is that every burrito goes into a panini press. This “secret” is elegant in its simplicity — the sort of solution a home cook might imagine.

On some nights, she says, she’ll put upward of 50 burritos through that small press.

Chit Chaat Cafe’s name isn’t just a clever pun but an accurate description of the restastation (stationaunt?). “There’s the great food, but I love the people here,” a regular who has brought his brother in from across town because he “has to try the samosas” tells me when he eyes the notebook in my hand. What’s his name? Who knows. He has no time for further chatter, as he fills a bag with the crispy treasures before scurrying off to devour them. I wonder if they make it to the car.

Sood says they’ve had visitors from Pennsylvania, New York, Richmond — even California. They’ve had visitors to the Capitol stop on their way into and out of D.C. One young man introduced his mom and his fiancée at the station.

Which is great, sure. But Sood predicts 80 to 90 percent of his diners are repeat customers. Locals. Regulars. And he wears that as a badge of honor. After all, they keep coming back for a reason.

He hopes to extend the “chit chat” aspect by making the station more of a community gathering place than it already is. He’s considering installing some arcade games for the kids and more signage for the first-timers.

The cafe just began serving food on Mondays, after being a Tuesday-to-Sunday operation — partly, he jokes, because working on Mondays was so boring without others around. (Okay, maybe he wasn’t joking.)

“It’s fun [working] here. You get to do the things you wanted to as a child,” he says. Those things include stocking up on sweets from the freezer, casually hanging around with members of the community who have become friends.

“It’s a happy place.”

As was our car on the drive back — despite the probable frostbite in our hands (and paws).

Chit Chaat Cafe

200 Maple Ave. E., Vienna, Va. 571-378-0867. cafechitchaat.com.

Hours: 11 to 9 p.m. daily.

Nearest Metro: Greensboro, 2.2 miles.

Prices: $2.49 to $19.99 for all items on the food menu.