dining

Taste of Havana opened August 15, offering nine ethnically inspired sandwiches.

About local-favorite Long’s Bakery, Stewart tells IM, “They let me go in the back and photograph the entire doughnut-making process. We ate so many of them.”

She enjoyed buffalo margherita pizza, vegetarian double chopped salad, and dessert at the downtown location of Indy’s own Martha Hoover’s Neapolitan-style pie spot.

Including Thirsty Scholar’s fluffy S’mores Cupcake.

The bar hummed with Cream Ale–sipping hipsters, those coal-mine canaries of emerging commercial pockets.

Jayne Nolting cobbled together this hearty dish that plays equally well as a side or main course. Plus, a video demonstration by Plum’s executive chef Jeremiah Clark.

Straight from a Hoosier blacksmith’s shop—the handles are deer antler, and the maker can stamp the steel with a name or other personal message.

Including the crispy, sauced-to-order duck wings (try the chimichurri) from Shoefly Public House.

Inside, it’s a low-lit den of charmingly old-school Bavarian motifs with dark-paneled walls, dangling antique farm implements, and barstools upholstered in deep ruby and avocado—fancy digs for an 11,000-square-foot converted chicken coop that opened last year on the 141-acre Walhill Farm.

Restaurateur Ian Hall quickly found a following for his fresh take on locally inspired cuisine when he opened this Southern Indiana standout in a strip mall in 2011.

When Bluffton native Tiercell William Schwartz returned to his hometown after a decade-long stint in New York, he longed for a place to get a drink and a big-city meal. So he opened his own restaurant with an urban vibe in 2010.

No more than two dozen seats, some with chunky, custom-made chairs, populate the snug dining room of Casey and Sylvia Petro’s burger joint in the heart of Chesterton.

Farm-to-fork cuisine gets a minimalist treatment at this spare, open restaurant tucked inside the just-added clubhouse at LaPorte’s Legacy Hills Golf Club.

Most Sunday mornings, as coffee brews and the smell of freshly baked cinnamon rolls perfumes the air, a line weaves from the tiny vestibule of The Winds Cafe and Bakery out through its front door to the brick-lined walkway and picketed entrance.

Foodies find their happy place in this small-town farm-to-fork spot that came to be when “a shaggy-haired chef from Florida’s Gulf Coast” fell in love with a country girl from Indiana.