All the tutorials I see for creating rest apis use express. While I'm sure this is a fine solution, I would like something with less overhead and as few dependency modules as possible. What are some alternative solutions?
You can try some alternative projects like Hapi.js http://spumko.github.io/ or Restify http://mcavage.github.io/node-restify/
They are focused on REST API development.
I know there is much more choices if you want to compare