In the two and a half years of travel to Indiana towns and trying tenderloins, the city with the most feedback and fanfare has been - Albion, IN. Who knew the smallest county seat in Indiana would have the biggest following? I was invited back to try another tenderloin in that town and I’d figure, heck, I’ll just go around the whole of Noble County and hang out in the towns and find good tenderloins. Doing some initial research, I think I could get a good 4, maybe 5, different blogs. So the first of the Noble County Tenderloin tour brings us to the northeast corner in Kendallville.
The Tenderloin
Just a stone’s throw south of Kendallville in the town of Avilla is Northern Indiana’s oldest restaurant: The St James Restaurant. So it goes that 145 years ago a guy with two first names – Jonathon James – built a hotel at the site. Like every hotel at the time, there was a tavern with food on the first floor and rooms upstairs. By the end of World War 2 the hotel had turned to apartments and the tavern area was run down. It was then purchased by the Freeman family and converted to a nice restaurant and has remained open ever since. The original building still stands as the 1st floor addition still uses the old exterior walls as part of a hallway surrounding the structure. The sign of “The New St James Hotel” that you can see in old pictures is preserved on the inside corner. We did get a quick tour of the upstairs, too. No longer compartmentalized, it is remodeled into a modern banquet area for private gatherings. It would be fitting that a historical gem of this magnitude would also prepare on of the best tenderloins to be found in the area. According to the menu the loin in cut in-house and hand breaded. The effort comes out in the taste of the sandwich. The breading is flakey and the meat smooth. With a light toasted bun, the fried sandwich would have made any civil war veteran hitch up his horse and wonder on in for a meal and a bed for the night. This is a really cool place to be. With all the history in and around it, it is a perfect destination or detour just to check it out.
The Town
Most of these blog trips occur on a Saturday as I have weekends off and a lot of places to see in Indiana are closed on Sundays. My routine is to get up early and make some coffee for my drive down to the town. If you read the last couple trips, I have forgone making coffee and just visited a local shop to get my caffeine fix. When google maps showed me a place called “WhatchamaCAKES” right on the downtown corner, I knew I had the perfect place to start my day. Located in the old pharmacy, the shelves and even the small ladders for the pharmacist to climb and pick out what concoction to distribute were still there. While cakes and ice cream are on the menu, the cinnamon rolls caught my son and mine eyes first. The coffee was top notch, but the warmed-up roll was one of the best I have ever tasted with the crisp sweet icing matched with the gooey sugar/cinnamon paste on the buttery dough. The owner was even right there in the back making fresh pastries for the day where you can watch and chat. No shipped from offsite or pre-frozen and thawed goodies here. These small downtown main streets all have their local coffee place that taste better than the chains on the outskirts; Kendallville and WhatchamaCakes sure are one of them.
Like most Indiana towns, the main street is sprinkled with antique stores. One pops out from the rest. We couldn’t help but go inside one with a spray-painted canopy called “Arkham City Oddities”. The place is set up like an antique store with different rooms featuring products for sale from different owners. But, instead of old furniture and knickknacks from people that have passed onto the next life, this one contains comics, action figures, books, art, & jewelry. It is like an antique store of the next generation (or two). It is worth a stop in, even if you are into normal antiquing, it’s a nice change of pace.
Kendallville’s got one! An old movie theater, that is. While pretty much every downtown in Indiana had a theater or an opera house, most have been decommissioned or torn down. The Strand was original to 1890, only 12 years after Northern Indiana’s oldest restaurant was built. It has been renovated many times, but has continued to be a venue for people to assemble and share entertainment. These days the grand old space has been split into two theaters. Besides the balcony at the back, the inside theater space is indistinguishable to the modern multi-plex cinema. Which actually has its advantages as the seats were comfortable and the sound / picture was perfect. The lobby pays tribute to the past as old pictures and playbills hang on the walls. The façade is something out of the glory days though, and helps give downtown Kendallville the older small-town look. Plus, there is something about just walking right off the street into the front door under a grand marquee that makes you feel the excitement of going to see a movie.
So you want to see a windmill… Well, you can see a whole field of windmills at the Mid-America Windmill Museum. On the eastern end of Kendallville lies a small neighborhood, but in the background windmills pepper the horizon. Starting off like any respectable museum would, you get a video in the theatre room before beginning the tour. It shows you the history and purposes of the windmill through time from grinding corn, pumping water, to generating electricity. The indoor portion of the tour exhibits the restoration of the windmills as well as the history of the barn that houses it. Outdoors is a path that goes traverses next to each windmill with a short history and location it was manufactured. You could say that if you see one windmill you’ve seen them all, but the windmill museum can show you the intricacies of each one and will have you wondering the next time you spot one on an old farm, “What year and where was that one made.”
One of my favorite tidbits of history is that no one knows why Jon James put the "St" on the name of the hotel. Like he was just assuming he would be a saint. I should rename this site St Tomko's Blog
by Michael Tomko
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