How to serve RESTful APIs?
The confusion might come from the concepts behind the tools you are using. So let's start with a little definition.


  Laravel and Artisan


Laravel

Framework for building a full MVC Web application in PHP. It is the equivalent of Spring-boot with Java or Rails with Ruby.

Artisan

Laravel's console driven interface for development. It provides tools such as the web server coming with PHP 5.4+. When using the "serve" command a simple web server will start. This is perfect for development, but I would suggest you use a server that gives you proper configuration flexibility in production such as Apache or nginx.


  Your other thoughts


Java/Ruby/PHP/Javascript

Are programming languages. Node.js is like an ecosystem that allows you to run client/server/middleware/tools Javascript based applications. Someone did a great job of comparing it with a Java ecosystem. Right here.


  But is Laravel artisan serve possible for production?


In theory, yes. It would require your development setup to be in production as well. Hence from this assertion, the answer becomes self evident for security, operability, configuration and performance to name a few. You will need a different configuration for production.


  How to serve RESTful API?


No matter which language you use, choose a library or a framework that will give you the tools to implement your APIs. Since Laravel is your framework, you can take a look at this tutorial to get started.