Brugge

This week’s update on Indy’s dining scene.

Check out the newcomers of Tavern at the Point and Black Eye Take Out.

Indy dining news this week includes an Irvington restaurant launching its dinner service, a chophouse coming to Mass Ave, and the opening of a new cafe on East Washington Street.

The five dishes you must try this week, including The Loft’s smoked salmon starter.

With wisps of toasted coconut in both aroma and flavor, Scarlet Lane’s Dorian tastes surprisingly light for a stout. It’s actually better than Flat12’s popular version.

Central Indiana’s first craft-beer wave broke a couple of decades ago. Though several of those breweries didn’t survive to witness today’s larger flood of openings, their brewers—and their stuff, and their legacies—are still floating around.

No doubt, Indy has quite an array of intriguing things to explore, but here are 26 of the city’s most noteworthy musts.

But now two of Indy’s titans of food and drink are pairing up to give suds-friendly cuisine its day: Ted Miller of Broad Ripple’s Brugge Brasserie,and award-winning chef Greg Hardesty of (deep breath now) H2O Restaurant & Sushi Bar, Elements, Room Four, and Recess.

Ted Miller, beer master behind Brugge Brasserie (1011 E. Westfield Blvd., 317-255-0978), is known for his “mad science” intellect and passion for creating outstanding esoteric beers around the world. He has created beers and built microbreweries in places like Seattle, Hong Kong, the Caribbean, Mainland China, and Taiwan. But because of his Indiana ties, he moved back in the early 2000s and has lent his knowledge to countless students of beer and brewery start-ups since. After generously sharing his talent and experience, Miller decided it was time to expand his own business. So he is changing addresses again. This time, however, he is sticking to Naptown and keeping Brugge as-is.

Of all the experiments chef Neal Brown has conducted, whether in his kitchen laboratoire or the culinary free market, none has come as close to successful alchemy as The Libertine Liquor Bar, his shrine to the cocktail in a Washington Street storefront downtown. A shot of Scandinavian austerity, a jigger of pre-Prohibition American frontier swagger, and a dash of orange bitters dosed from eyedroppers by Brown’s exacting barkeeps, The Libertine is a study in contrasts—some logical, some forced—that all mingle, dazzlingly. Take “The Last Word,” one of several clever coinages on Brown’s drink menu. It mixes Bluecoat gin, lending its distinctly piney profile, with Luxardo maraschino and green chartreuse, haute liqueurs as opposite as stop and go. A bracing hit of lime merges these improbable comrades into a restrained elixir that cleanses the palate at the same time it sweetens it, a beguiling medicine you’re all too glad to take.