Tom Battista

The one-of-kind independent cinema and culinary collab, makes its debut after a long delay.

Grab your popcorn, downtown Indianapolis’s first art-house cinema will open its doors just after the start of the new year.

The Idle is now open … no longer, ahem, idle.

“I don’t want to be too cheeky about pairing food with the movies.”

A path will lead from the Cultural Trail to the park, where people will be able to watch traffic merge from two interstates, sometimes harrowingly so.

When Buffett takes the stage at Klipsch Music Center on June 23, he’ll have the local restaurateur and longtime stage manager to thank for it.

Indy dining news this week includes Ed and Tom Battista’s upcoming project, the launch of Open Society Public House’s coffee program, and the grand opening of Primanti Bros. sandwich shop in Noblesville.

“We’ve been coming to Naptown ever since the ’60s,” says Clinton. “We go way back with Indianapolis.”

If opening Bluebeard was all about innovation for restaurateurs Ed and Tom Battista, buying the 55-year-old Pasquale’s Pizza involved holding onto house favorites.

If there were a playbook for new restaurants, mapping out everything hot and covetable right now in the ever-changing game of dining out, Fletcher Place newcomer Bluebeard would already have it memorized.

Since January, Indianapolis Monthly has been following the progress of Bluebeard (653 Virginia Ave.). So this past Friday, our forks were at the ready for the restaurant’s soft opening. Fans of Abbi Merriss Adams and John Adams were happy to see the pair back in the kitchen (right behind the bar), plating everything from white-bean salad with chorizo, zucchini, and radicchio fleur to a sharable whole snapper with house giardiniera.

Editor’s Note: This story on the soon-to-be-opened Bluebeard restaurant appeared in the May 2012 issue. For 10 weeks this winter and spring, we followed father-and-son team Tom and Ed Battista as they faced the joys and tribulations of opening their new restaurant, Bluebeard. It is a venture, however rewarding, not for the faint of heart. […]

In the coming months, Charlie McIntosh will don an apron and assume his head baker role at the soon-to-open Amelia’s, an Italian-style hearth bread bakery in a Fletcher Place mini-restaurant complex at 653 Virginia Avenue.