Terry Kirts

If you’ve been following the saga of all the startups trying to make a go of it on the ground floor of the recently renovated Ambassador building downtown, you may have been surprised to see an “Open” sign lit in the front window for the last few weeks. In the very beginning, after Yats owner Joe Vuskovich “stepped away” from the original Bar Yats concept just as the place was opening in September of 2010, the bar morphed into The Bar at the Ambassador with real promise serving authentic Cajun dishes and top-notch cocktails, including excellent Sazeracs and Vieux Carres. But slow, understaffed service and a dwindling crowd caused the place to change concepts, then close, until it reopened briefly in January of this year as Azul, with a curious menu of Mexican-inspired dishes though minimal decor changes. The doors darkened just a few weeks later, with little hope of a bar or eatery coming back to this seemingly prime downtown location just north of Central Library, amid a host of downtown apartment complexes.

But in mid-August, the place opened again as The Diplomat at the Ambassador (43 E. 9th St., 317-602-4433), the name clearly hoping to restore some of the style and elegance that the historic space promises. With a streamlined menu that features everything from crab cakes and fish tacos to affordable stick-to-your ribs dinners such as pot roast ($12) and duck with a Port and berry reduction ($14), the place has promise to do what its forebears didn’t: provide straightforward bar eats and solid drinks to a downtown block with somewhat of a dearth of dining choices.

With so many food trucks stuffing the humble taco full of Korean-style pork and Indian pakoras, another “fusion taqueria” is hardly a trendsetter. But when veteran chef George Muñoz started filling thick tortillas with salt-and-pepper shrimp and skirt steak marinated in red curry, he set the bar for flavor. In July, Muñoz opened his first solo effort, La Chinita Poblana (927 E. Westfield Blvd., 317-722-8108, lachinitapoblana.com), in the former home of Boogie Burger in Broad Ripple. Removing indoor seats and painting walls in rainbow pastels gave the tiny lean-to a new spaciousness. Counters and neighboring outdoor tables still accommodate those dining in. Bubble teas and hot-and-sour soup, offered alongside churros and sweet-potato fries smothered in mole, attest to Muñoz’s playful approach. But the crispy bark on his slow-braised pork carnitas and his perfectly blackened yellow-curry tilapia, not to mention custom sauces and mixed herbs, help elevate his funky tacos above the rest. 

If you’ve driven up Meridian Street lately and wondered about the construction at the once-dingy hotel north of 28th Street, you are in for a tasty surprise. For the past 18 months, with the help of grants by the Lilly Endowment and other entities, Ivy Tech Community College has been quietly, furiously revamping the former Stouffer’s hotel, recently a Christian ministry, and relocating its culinary school classrooms to the 13-story, 196,000-square-foot high rise, now with nine culinary labs, state-of-the-art fixtures, and the potential to accommodate 1,500 budding student chefs. Just as exciting as the impact these students will have on the local restaurant and banquet scene is the opening, at the recent start of the new semester, of Courses (2820 N. Meridian St.), the culinary school’s 140-seat restaurant.

The opening is a coup for Hoosier history buffs as well. The North Meridian address links back to a storied history of baked beans and the King of Rock ’n’ Roll. The school is built on the property that was once the site of the ornate mansion of Frank Van Camp, the famous bean magnate, who built his stately home in the late 1800s, fitting it with ornate wood carvings and leaded glass windows. It wasn’t until 1965 that the location was converted to a hotel by Stouffer’s, the frozen dinner folks, who were expanding their restaurant and hotel empire around the country. Noting the structural riches of the Van Camp estate, Stouffer’s architects preserved many of the windows and integrated various carved archways into the hotel design. Ivy Tech’s designers have kept these historical details in their new culinary institute, creating a refreshed, pristine facility that yet has links to the past. Sadly, the Institute for Basic Life Principles, the building’s most recent tenant, removed the second-floor swimming pool when it moved into the facility in the late 1980’s, but Ivy Tech has converted the Institute’s spacious auditorium into a stunning multipurpose space with soaring windows that will soon host weddings and receptions. As a hotel, the facility saw its share of celebrities and dignitaries. Dolly Parton and Glen Campbell both purportedly stayed here when performing in town, and it’s believed that it was the last hotel Elvis stayed in while he was offering his infamous last concert at Market Square Arena downtown.

Associate professor and culinary arts instructor chef Thom England has had the joy of ordering many of the latest cooking appliances and gadgets to set the school’s high-tech labs and teaching kitchens apart, including built-in sous vide wells, induction burners, even a Swiss Pacojet, which can blend foods at super-fast speeds at sub-zero temperatures. Just this week, Englad was still jogging about the building, making certain that the right smoker was installed in the right kitchen. In addition to the much larger digs, Ivy Tech’s culinary school will be operating as no-waste facility, with extensive composting and machinery for turning waste products into lint. In addition to its labs, the school now houses climate-controlled chocolate work and charcuterie curing rooms, and plans are in the works for herb and vegetable gardens to the west of the building.

Ivy Tech’s culinary program culminates with two hands-on classes where students gain experience that’s as close to restaurant work as possible. Now, that experience is coming at Courses, which is currently serving lunch on Monday and Tuesday and dinner on Wednesday and Thursday. The menu reflects what the students are studying in 8-week courses, currently classic French dishes such as Coquille St. J

>> PHOTOS: View scenes from the day at Dig-IN 2012.

If you’ve been getting your fusion tacos at a food truck lately, you might want to consider going back to an old-fashioned restaurant with four walls. Just don’t expect it to be a very big restaurant. That adorable closet of an eatery on Westfied Boulevard in Broad Ripple that’s been everything from a fair-food outpost to the former home of Boogie Burger is now La Chinita Poblana (927 E. Westfield Blvd., 317-722-8108), the cutest, tastiest little tradition-bending taqueria you’ll ever check in at on Foursquare.

Chopsticks in the basket of plastic cutlery, a menu for bubble teas, and a new palette of purples, greens, and yellows will cue you in that this is no ordinary taqueria with carne asada and pollo-stuffed tortillas. Creative chef George Munoz, who hails from Chicago and earned his degree at the Washburne Culinary Institute, knows contemporary taco lovers want something just a bit more inventive. But he hasn’t abandoned Latin flavors by fusing them with Japanese eggplant, Thai basil, and curry. He’s simply taken them to the next level.

Take his fish tacos. For these well-stuffed bundles, he blackens tilapia with a coating of yellow curry so that the flaky, almost creamy fish takes on just the right amount of heat. With a tempered chipotle mayo and pickled Napa cabbage, this is an enviable mix of crunchy and tangy flavors that’s darn near perfect with the restrained sweetness of a strawberry-lime agua fresca on the side. Plenty of crispy, dark bark on his “red-braised” pork carnitas lend lots of flavor to one of the more traditional treatments, but the marinade has a slightly sweet, slightly briny quality that would make it at home on a Thai table. With just the right amount of a cooling avocado crema, this could star at just about any small-plates innovator up the street.

To add a bit more space to the decidedly cramped storefront, Munoz removed the indoor seating, though counters work well for standup munching, and there are plenty of tables just outside. The counter clerks will pass your order out the window.

Baker says he and Means hope to open the SoBro spot in nine months, offering breakfast at the coffee shop, lunch, and dinner in the brewery, and an outside music venue for close to 1,000 people.

The Mexican chef was out sick for the week. That was the most disappointing thing about our visit to Mike’s Korean Bistro (3712 Lafayette Rd., 317-987-6856), one of the newest and perhaps most curious international mashups in the city, with two separate menus for Korean and Mexican standards.

Is it healthier? Does it taste richer and creamier? Or is it a bacterial threat and potential health hazard to the larger public?

Call him a caterer. Call him a chef. Just don’t call Brad Gates a man without big ideas. He may be working in one of his smallest kitchens yet, in a corner of City Market, but Gates is putting his highly refined palate to work on catering, to-go lunches, and one of Indy’s best cheese cases, stocked with up to 40 selections.

Rockville Road’s status as a destination for international eats recently grew by one cheery and intriguing eatery, Tandoori King (7220 Rockville Rd., 317-240-8000), which is billing itself as an “Indo-Pak” restaurant offering both classics of Indian cuisine and some not-so-common Pakistani specialties. We stopped into this spacious storefront restaurant last week to try it out and were charmed by neat rows of napkins folded into glasses atop all of the tables around us. We also found ourselves intrigued by the little labels on the lunch buffet promising goat dishes and egg curry. But since it was dinner time, we put ourselves in the hands of our pleasantly gruff but no-nonsense waiter, who laid out a whole meal for us including a crisp iceberg and cucumber salad on the house and heavenly light and flaky garlic naan—some of the best we’d had in town.

Life on the road isn’t glamorous, unless your idea of glamour is waking at 4 a.m. to practice your performance, dressing your kids at 6, writing until lunch, making phone calls all afternoon, then picking the kids up, cooking dinner, and sleeping for five hours.

Looking for a 5-star margarita for your Cinco de Mayo sipping this Saturday? We’re not talking newfangled margaritas with fresh-squeezed guava juice or tequila aged for 20 years. We’re talking margaritas as big as your head, served up in giant bowls that could house a whole school of fish, rimmed with salt and big wedges of lime. For a margarita you can spend the whole night drinking—or split with the whole table—try one of these 5 big pours:

1. Mexican food lovers on the Westside know that Wednesday night is margarita pitcher night at Puerto Vallarta Mexican Restaurant and Cantina (5510 Lafayette Rd., 317-280-0676), but you can get one any night, and this one might just contend for the largest in town.

2. Served in a curvy tall glass that probably holds as much as the big glass bowls at other Mexican joints, the margarita at Los Chilaquiles (3712 Lafayette Rd., 317-293-1111) is definitely a looker, with plenty of chunks of lime. Some interesting dishes you don’t always find elsewhere, including great sopas, huevos rancheros, and the name sake chilaquiles, served with plenty of

sour cream and queso fresco.

3. If you operate nearly a dozen (currently 11 and counting) restaurants in a single metro area, you have to be doing something right, and the margarita at El Rodeo is definitely the right size and a perfect quencher when you’re digging into a super spicy plate of shrimp diabla!

4. With several bright and cheery locations sprinkled around Central Indiana, as well as on the west and south sides of Indianapolis, El Meson Mexican Restaurant and Cantina may have one of the largest selections of combo platters in town—and salt-rimmed and frozen margaritas that won’t leave you wanting.

5. If you want some of Indy’s most authentic and beloved Mexican cuisine to go along with your margarita, stop in at El Sol de Tala (2444 E. Washington St., 317-636-1250), where the margaritas are some of the biggest around and almost as good as that guacamole the regulars rave about. Now in its 33rd year in business.

Bonus—Specials:

Get started early on some tasty and plentiful Cinco de Mayo specials at Adobo Grill (110 E. Washington St., 317-822-9990). Shrimp crepes, pan-seared Ahi tuna with a mango salad, and a chocolate sponge cake in the shape of a pyramid stuffed with plum mousse may just prove that May 5 is as much for dining as it is for tying one on.

Cinco de Mayo isn’t just one day at On the Border, which has been unveiling daily drink and dinner specials (including free meals for kids) for the 30 days leading up to the holiday.

With all of the crowds clogging breakfast and brunch places around town, we were excited that First Watch, the Florida-based “daytime cafe” with nearly 100 outlets in 14 states, had finally touched down across from the Fashion Mall

Whether it’s the adorable wall of brown paper bags you fill out with a Sharpie or just all of the tasty free extras you can pile on your sandwich—olive salad, pesto, even Cheez Whiz—there’s definitely something fresh and fun about the new Which Wich? (910 W. 10th St., 317-632-9424), which landed mid-March in The Avenue complex near IUPUI. We stopped in to try out this Dallas-based sandwich chain with over 180 stores from Florida to southern California (with one in Carmel as well) and found ourselves almost dizzy with all of the choices—from the “Bac-Hammon” (pork on top of pork) to the Elvis Wich, inspired by the King with bacon, peanut butter, and banana. Sadly, they were out of bananas at the end of the day, but the staff quickly apologized and offered us a free sandwich on our next visit.

Tired of those Filet O’Fish specials on the signs at your local McDonald’s? Craving some real seafood here in the Heartland that doesn’t come out of the freezer at your local megamart?