The local beer is “craft.”
It costs $8 for a small plastic cup of stout that tastes like chocolate porridge. I set it on the bar and watch the liquid heave and crater from waves of feral folk-rock thrashing the packed room, coming from a bandanna’d blond kid onstage with a guitar, hair pasted to his pink face by righteous sweat.
Band stickers cover random surfaces of this old building like scales on a half-scraped salmon. Upstairs it’s open studio night, and women in wool beanies and art bros in Woolrich snowflake pullovers hustle past the galleries, cocking their heads to ponder installations referencing Star Wars circa ’77.
It’s my first time in this place. Maybe like you, though, I’ve been here before—anyone who’s walked through Williamsburg or seen an episode of Girls has. It’s a landscape of under-35s, bristling with locally brewed IPAs, restaurant pop-ups, and new kinds of mustard. And everybody—literally everybody—is flaunting freestyle forearm ink.
But tonight I’m not in Williamsburg. I’m in Indianapolis. And what’s playing in Indy, on this raw December night in Fountain Square, is a specific language of food, style, and cultural appreciation now spoken all over America and, damn, all over the world.
Go to Roma Norte in Mexico City, where you’ll stroll past guys with waxed mustaches and women in ’80s jumpsuits, nibbling expensive paletas from a mod turquoise cart. In Old Town Bangkok, around the corner from an illicit cockfight on the street, there’s a young Thai dude who set up a tiny Third Wave coffee bar. If you ask, he’ll tell you it’s modeled after San Francisco’s Blue Bottle. North, in Chiang Mai, a couple of Thai hipsters preside over the kind of barbershop that’s the anchor tenant of any Brooklyn block—in the chair, you can throw back a shot of whiskey.
It was less than a decade ago that urban America first got into this revived notion of homesteading, raising Ameraucana chickens and wearing overalls to take all-day butchering classes or make things in their tiny home kitchens (so many mason jars full of so many pickles). The Brooklyn Flea launched in 2008 with its mix of food and vintage, and by the next year an editor of Edible Brooklyn described a new demographic to the New York Times: “It’s that guy in the band with the big plastic glasses who’s already asking for grass-fed steak and knows about nibs.”
In Oakland, California, where I live, neighborhoods like Temescal are mourning braiding salons and African-American fried-fish shacks. You can buy vegan Earl Grey ice cream, or a terrarium of succulents, then head to the boutique for $129 hand-dyed shirts that aren’t so different from those at Le Bon Marché, the Paris department store, during last year’s “Brooklyn Rive Gauche” pop-up.
None of these objects is definitively Brooklyn, but the sum total nudges certain enclaves—Chicago’s Wicker Park, Los Angeles’s Silver Lake, and Stockholm’s SoFo—or cities like Austin and Portland (Oregon and Maine) into places where a near-spiritual reverence for anything “local” and a resolutely dialed-in personal style can tip into caricature. One that, astonishingly, looks and feels the same no matter where you are.
You see it even in smaller cities like Tulsa and Indianapolis, where I’m pushing through the crowd at The HI-FI before I head out to taste Indiana-distilled Backbone Bourbon at another bar. It’s late when I start to think about whether this city can hit all those Brooklyn notes and still feel distinctively like Indianapolis. In other words, once you look beyond the throwback cocktails and cheesemongers, can our seemingly universal food codes act as a shortcut for cities to hit on their real potential? That’s what I came to Indianapolis to find out.
Just up Virginia Avenue is a car-strafed condo strip called Fletcher Place. That’s where Milktooth is.
It’s best to sit at the counter at Milktooth, kitty-corner from chef and owner Jonathan Brooks as he works the sauté pans. The restaurant does brunch daily—opens at seven for coffee, passes out menus at nine, and closes at three—inside a rehabbed garage. It’s bright and open; looks like it was decorated by a thrifter with a good eye.
Brooks is 31, though he could pass for younger, wearing an apron with strings that pinch his back. He has a rooster tattooed on his hand, a pig’s skull on his neck, and something on his upper arm that resembles a fat ear of shucked corn.
For the next 40 minutes, he hands me plates from the line: a warm, delicately crumbly biscuit made with wild-rice flour, topped with a thick, cool disk of persimmon butter that tastes like raw Christmas-cookie dough; a Dutch baby pancake with craggy bits of oatmeal-dukka streusel, dabbed with spheres of puréed parsnip so smooth it’s like the whipped butter at IHOP; a grilled cheese sandwich of Indiana raclette. The bread is black—Brooks took it astonishingly far in the pan—and it’s perfect that way.
A cocktail arrives: Del Maguey mezcal and poppy-seed liqueur, shaken along with some egg white. It has tannins that filter up through the mousse-y cloud—like smoke through a bong’s diffuser, it’s been de-harshed. It’s the best egg-white drink I’ve ever had.
Everything I taste that day at Milktooth shows off tight technical skills and an easy, loping confidence. The food is brilliant.
Then I begin to ask him how a kid in Indianapolis has the life experience to produce food at this level, then wonder to myself whether I’d be asking the same of a 31-year-old chef in L.A. or Chicago. I must look like a total snob, because as I hustle into my coat, making plans to meet up with Brooks later that night, I stop to tell the cook who made the cocktail how perfect it was.
He says thanks and asks where I’m from. “New York?”
“California,” I say.
“Here’s what I always wanted to know,” he asks: “When a magazine tells you they’re sending you to Indianapolis, are you like, ‘Damn, really? Indy?’ ”
Later that evening, Jonathan Brooks interrupts himself and points behind me. “I think that’s Sleater-Kinney!”
I turn to see the backs of two women leaving the restaurant, Bluebeard. It’s attached to Amelia’s bakery, which produces very good fennel seed–sprinkled semolina bread.
A smiling man is looming above our table. If any one person bears responsibility for the Brooklynization of Indy, it’s probably this guy, Tom Battista.
Battista, who looks like he’s settled softly into his 60s, used to manage tours for big acts. He got his start on the road with David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs tour in 1974, and now he’s into seeing that other kinds of young artists—Brooks and Bluebeard chef Abbi Merriss, to name two—are giving his city an identity beyond pork tenderloin sandwiches and the Indy 500.
He acquires evocative old buildings, then rehabs and leases them to young restaurateurs who promise to do something interesting. That’s one huge difference with Brooklyn: There, restaurant owners struggle to make rent. In Indy, Tom Battista plays benevolent papa.
That’s what happened with Amelia’s too, and with Black Market, where I ate delicious hunks of roasted beef heart, and with Calvin Fletcher’s Coffee Company, a chilled-out café nearby. Battista bought the old garage where Milktooth sits, then got in touch with Brooks to tell him he had a place he should check out.
Over drinks and a plate of Parmesan-loaded spaghetti, Brooks tells me he used to hate Indianapolis. He followed his older brother, a college professor, to Missoula, Montana, a place he liked for its hunting, fishing, and lack of bullshit. He’d sometimes drive the eight hours to Portland or Seattle just to eat in solid restaurants. Cooking’s call was too loud to keep Brooks in Missoula, so he moved to Chicago, staged around for a while till he was broke, then did the thing he swore he wouldn’t: He came back to Indianapolis.
That sort of migration helps explain why things that once defined Brooklyn—pottery studios, mead distilleries, or millennials selling their crafts—have turned up all over. Folks like Brooks read about them online, or got into them while traveling or while living in Brooklyn proper, then decided there was no reason their hometowns shouldn’t have them too. It helps that a greater percentage of young people are moving to cities than ever before. And why would they choose Brooklyn itself, where the average one-bedroom apartment rents for more than $2,500 monthly? That doesn’t even include a garden for growing stuff.
Brooks and I move on to Pioneer, where we swab toast through a smooth pink puck of chicken liver mousse. The bartender is saying something quietly to Brooks, who nods. “What did he say?” I ask. Brooks explains they’re talking about Sleater-Kinney being in Fountain Square, but only two of them, without Carrie Brownstein, the one from Portlandia. It’s never the famous ones who show up, he jokes.
Our last stop is Marrow, where John Adams, who used to be at Bluebeard, is the executive chef. It’s after ten on a weeknight, and we down old-fashioneds made with bone marrow–infused rye whiskey as Adams delivers chitlins fried crisp, delicate as curls of sloughed-off snakeskin, in a shallow bowl with red chile mash. It’s fantastic, if a bit overwrought.
At some point, I tell Brooks how I’m in Indianapolis to find Brooklyn, and to see how America’s dominant food trends play out in a place with an emerging restaurant scene. I see his face drop, like I’ve delivered the ultimate insult, regarding these young chefs as cartoon characters.
I worry he’s going to get up and bail. Instead he tells me, basically, that I haven’t looked hard enough.
“We have people who come into Milktooth and say, ‘This feels like New York,’ ” Brooks says. “I’m like, it’s not f*#%ing Brooklyn. It’s Indianapolis.”
As I try to smooth things over, telling him I think what he and chefs like Adams are doing is amazing, I feel like the lamest guy in the room. These young people distilling gin and smoking elk—for a lot of them, Brooklyn is the Disney version of their lives. It’s a gesture, but not substantial. Few of them have their sights on moving to the coasts, because the real achievement isn’t getting out of the place where you were born to build a new identity for yourself. It’s better to stay put and change the culture—genuinely transform—where you are. And while it’s easy for visitors like me to grouse that all these restaurants in all these cities feel similar, the fact that you can eat this well in Indianapolis is alone worth celebrating.
“The moment I knew something was going on,” Brooks says, “was when I looked and saw there were more people ordering chicken livers than waffles.”
From the backseat, my Uber driver is just this wall of long auburn hair. “I haven’t been in this part of Indy in a long time,” she says. “It’s changed.”
Chris and Ally Benedyk opened their sandwich spot, Love Handle, less than six months ago. It’s inside a former Subway franchise, complete with fake wood-grain tiles and bolted-down benches. The Benedyks grew up in Indy, left for Milwaukee for a while, and now they’re back with their own place, pioneering on the Near Eastside, which looks like it has a way to go despite the food co-op.
I order the Darger, a roast pork belly sandwich: pale, tender slices of meat, with chips of rose-colored turnip that have been pickled in pink lemonade. It comes with popcorn dusty with nutritional yeast mixed with pork fat and fennel butter. “Darger,” Chris tells me, is a reference to Henry Darger, an outsider artist whose work was discovered after he died. Chris likes to name his sandwiches for misunderstood geniuses, he says.
As I finish the sandwich, I’m curious if the rawness of a place like Love Handle—the energy of young chefs, the grand narrative built from little pieces of this and that—is how actual Brooklyn used to feel before Paris pop-ups and million-dollar condos. What if it isn’t so much Indianapolis trying to be Brooklyn, as Brooklyn wanting to capture something of Indianapolis? I think of the kid I saw onstage at The HI-FI, who told me that it was his first paid gig. Maybe someday, if everything falls right, he’ll be playing Brooklyn.
Then I recall my night at Marrow, where a young bar-back hovered just out of speaking range before coming up to Brooks with obvious deference, his head a little bowed. “Dude,” he managed above the music, “I have to say: I love your trilobite tattoo.”
It’s on the back of Brooks’s arm, the one I thought was a chubby ear of corn.
“Trilobite?” I asked.
“Eh,” Brooks said. “It’s kind of a Midwest thing.”
This story is part of Bon Appétit's first-ever Culture Issue. All month long we'll be bringing you stories from the intersection of food and music and entertainment and politics and more.