The Fountain Room

Perry and Blake Fogelsong, a father-and-son restaurant team, spent part of the pandemic driving around Wisconsin eating in supper clubs, and came back to Indianapolis wanting to build one. The Fountain Room opened in the summer of 2022 inside the Bottleworks District — the redeveloped Coca-Cola bottling plant at the top of Massachusetts Avenue — and reads as a roaring-twenties steakhouse crossed with a Midwestern supper club: velvet booths, low chandeliers, a working reel-to-reel, and a relish tray that arrives before anything else. OpenTable and People jointly named it one of America's fifty most beautiful restaurants, and Indianapolis Monthly has treated it as the district's standout since it opened.

For non-drinkers the useful detail is structural: the drinks menu carries a printed "No ABV" heading, which in a room whose entire identity is built on strong cocktails and a long wine list is a deliberate choice rather than an accommodation. The Crouching Tiger is peach purée with pear, lime and ginger beer; Circle City Sober is the house long drink; the Cherry Burlesque runs cherry and lime against honey syrup, ginger beer and mint; and there is an alcohol-removed Sauvignon Blanc poured by the glass, which is still unusual in Indianapolis outside the two Orangily shops. Prices sit around $10 to $12, in line with the cocktails rather than discounted to soft-drink level — which cuts both ways, but does mean the drinks are made to the same specification. Because this is a supper club and a destination dining room, book ahead; the bar is a reasonable walk-in option earlier in the evening, and Sundry & Vice is in the Bottleworks Hotel next door. The supper-club format turns out to suit a non-drinker better than most restaurant formats do. The meal is long, the relish tray and the prime rib do the work, and the evening is not structured around ordering a second bottle — so a table of mixed drinkers and non-drinkers ends up on roughly equal footing, which is not true in a wine-led dining room. The Bottleworks District around it is also unusually easy to spend an alcohol-free evening in: Pins Mechanical and the Living Room Theaters are in the same complex, and the whole site is a converted Coca-Cola bottling plant, which gives the neighbourhood its name and its Art Deco bones.