Indianapolis 2 day food crawl, this weekend 10/24 to 10/25

I ate an outstanding Chinese meal on my last Indy trip. Yes, I need to post on that soon! It was the best meal I have had in recent memory and the best Chinese meal I have had in the states.

I'm going to be heading down to Indianapolis to for a 2 day food crawl to have a big meal there, plus a few other favorites. There are a couple seats left in our vehicle. Anyone interested?

I assume this is a leave Friday return Sunday deal? What departure and return times are you looking at?

Hey Zoid! Hope you can make it.

We'll be leaving Saturday morning, Meeting at my house in Lincoln Square at 9am. We'd leave Indy Sunday as soon after dinner as possible, hopefully to make it back to Chicago around 10pm. Feel free to PM for more details. So far we have a good group, after you room for only one or two more, depending if we wanna sit 3 to the back.

So far it's

1. Me
2. Teresa
3. MHL
4. fropones
5. Bernard
6.

A Hoosier-tinged "Howdy t'ya!"

I don't have organized images or even a particularly cogent narrative about our trip at the moment, but I still wanted to quickly post a note to thank laikom (Matt Z.) and Teresa for organizing and executing a fun, eclectic outing to some unexpectedly exotic corners of the largely vanilla- and whitebread-seeming land of Indiana in and around Indianapolis.

Despite unexpected glitches of some intended destinations having uncooperative hours of operation, Matt's and Teresa's native knowledge of the local landscape/foodscape/funscape, along with tremendously valuable help from Indiana friends Tyler and Alex--respected food mavens in their own right--enabled our party to experience numerous top-notch and/or interesting offerings in a relatively short time with minimal wasted caroming back and forth about town.

I'll say here that I need others with better memories and literal & pictorial documentation (some misc. Instagram pix here) to flesh-out my report and supply more details of our various stops, but this'll give an initial overview of where we went and what our targets included:

• "Coffee" at Baker Miller before we even left town on Saturday, which, in typical LTH style, meant "Coffee in addition to" (...their grits breakfast plate, lox plate, maple creme pie, biscuits & gravy plate.)
  
• A short stop in the "rurals" near Indianapolis to pick up several dozen farm-fresh eggs, some of which had light green shells.
  
• Lunch in Indy gotten from Jamaican Style Jerk and eaten at a nearby park: pork chops and ribs with a good jerk sauce on the side, curried chicken, beans & rice with sweet plantains. (We'd just missed nabbing their last oxtail of the day.)
  
• A selection of sweet or savory buns/croissants/rolls from Kolache Factory--containing fruit or sausage & jalapeno, sausage & gravy, pepperoni & mushroom, bacon & cheese, ham/egg/cheese--you get the idea.... I thought these were rather more "commercial/commoditized" though, and lacked a hole-in-the-wall-personally-crafted sort of character, but still were interesting and reasonably tasty.
  
• Beer from one of a plethora of new local craft beer sources and microbreweries, Fountain Square Brewing (mine was Pumpkin Smash Ale).
  
• Another stop at New Day Craft Mead & Cider, with live acoustic musicians (largely drowned out by the concurrent chatter), where I found an interesting locally-made tart cherry mead called Washington's Folly.
  
• A really outstanding multi-course Chinese dinner on Saturday at Asian Snack, a hole-in-the-wall eatery inside a large international grocery store. Here, Bernard's Mandarin Chinese skills were a valuable extra asset to our ordering ability with the somewhat English-challenged, but charming and enthusiastic proprietor who I believe was the primary (perhaps sole?) chef. At one point, she surprised us with a companion to our backpacked-in Tecate that was masquerading as apple juice: a passed-around cup containing a hefty jolt of baijiu (i.e., "white alcohol") Chinese drinking rocket fuel.
  
• A Sunday Japanese lunch visit to One World Market of Indiana for collections of sushi and other dishes, some of which were economically assembled for us from deli-like pre-packaged portions of hamachi, ikura, tuna(s), etc., that we could grab from a cold-case and hand over to be, um, sushi-fied/sashimi-ed. Also a source for Japanese groceries, bottled and boxed foods & mixes, snacks, and souvenirs.
  
• The Bombay Bazaar was the grocery store site for our multi-course Pakistani dinner augmented by random selections of southasian-popular softdrinks including Limca and Thums-Up, and a few packages of paan--digestif concoctions of many ingredients & spices bound into a large mouth-sized packet by a betel leaf.
  
• Tasting a post-dinner, well made breaded tenderloin sandwich (it came with fried breaded mushrooms on the side along with the typical ranch dressing condiment cup), plus miscellaneous Bloody Marys & beers, shared six-wise at Pawn Shop Pub, a quintessentially laidback Indy-style bar.

Our Indiana jaunt was flavored by some activities not typical to LTH groups, such as an impromptu stop at Atomic Duckpin Bowling in Fountain Square for some duckpin bowling: rolling non-fingerholed 5-inch bowling balls on a standard bowling alley against pint-sized bowling pins.

We also had an opportunity to visit Postal Recording, Alex's and Tyler's recording studio built in a former U.S. Post Office, where fropones and Bernard were able to play on a professional soundboard mixing 20 or so channels of audio sourced from a previously recorded 2-inch-wide analogue master tape. Meanwhile, I was off in another area perched on a drum set's stool, noodling on an ukulele picked from one of multiple racks, all-told holding around a couple dozen acoustic and electric guitars and basses.

Finally, we had a mystery activity, orchestrated in advance by laikom, that turned out to be an afternoon-long visit to Conner Prairie Interactive History Park, a Williamsburg-like costumed theme park and historical settlement derived from the William Conner settlement. At Conner Prairie, we could learn how folks in the settlement lived and worked in the year 1836 by conversing with the personnel while they were engaged in typical activities of the settlement performed in "unbreakable character" (i.e., they'd converse with us exclusively as though we were visitors also living in the year 1836, while refusing to acknowledge or understand anything modern we carried like a mobile phone, or mention of a concept that was a post-19th century. "You're from Chicago? I hear they're booming up there with close to 10,000 people now that there's steamship access from the East!") We also had occasion to watch kids--from a safe distance --try their hand at tomahawk target-throwing, plus we flew at the chance to take a cable-tethered helium balloon ride to a height of about 350 feet for a panoramic view of the settlement and surrounding fall foliage. Pretty cool. (With a bit of bounce and sway, too.)

Many thanks to our LTH tour guide brethren and to Tyler W. and Alex K., as well as to the warm, lively, and welcoming Carolyn Z.--laikom's mom--and her family for comfortably accommodating our party overnight (and congrats to her for thoroughly "beating the pants off" of most us in a colorful late-night card game.)

To those who missed out on this fun adventure to the Eastern Land of tenderloin sandwiches, ranch dressing-as-universal-condiment, and burgeoning microbreweries neighboring LTH-worthy non-midwestern-American cuisine instances camouflaged amid the sprawl of Hardees, Steak'n'Shakes, megagroceries, and innumerable other chainstore satraps, I can only say, "Yep, unfortunately you definitely missed out on this one...but don't miss another similar opportunity if you can avoid doing so."

--Matt

Baker Miller
4610 N Western Ave, Chicago, IL 60625
(312) 208-5639

Jamaican Style Jerk
3355 N Keystone Ave, Indianapolis, IN 46218
(317) 926-1110

Kolache Factory
890 E 116th St Carmel, IN 46032
(317) 816-2253

Fountain Square Brewing
1301 Barth Ave, Indianapolis, IN 46203
(317) 493-1410

New Day Mead & Cider
1102 Prospect St, Indianapolis, IN 46203
(888) 632-3379

Asian Snack
3605 Commercial Dr, Indianapolis, IN 46222
(317) 297-1072

One World Market of Indiana
8466 Castleton Corner Dr, Indianapolis, IN 46250
(317) 842-3442

Bombay Bazaar
7247 Fishers Landing Dr, Fishers, IN 46038
(317) 585-9130

Pawn Shop Pub
2222 E 54th St, Indianapolis, IN 46220
(317) 255-5430

-- Also --

Atomic Duckpin Bowling
1105 Prospect St, Indianapolis, IN 46203
(317) 685-1955

Postal Recording
1144 S Belmont Ave, Indianapolis, IN 46221
(317) 385-8626

Conner Prairie Interactive History Park
13400 Allisonville Rd, Fishers, IN 46038
(317) 776-6000