Around 11:30 on a Tuesday, before the lunch crowd arrives, Jerry Loughmiller is usually standing at the end of the bar with a cup of coffee and a clipboard. He’s checking delivery sheets, talking to his kitchen manager, and occasionally stopping to chat with a regular who wandered in early. He’s been doing some version of this for over thirty years at the same address on Market Street, just east of the City-County Building, in a part of downtown that sees more county employees and courthouse lawyers than tourists.
Loughmiller’s has been here since 1986, which in Indianapolis restaurant terms is practically geological. The building is a narrow, dark-paneled room with low ceilings and a long bar that could have come out of a 1970s tavern, because much of it did. There are framed photos on the walls — sports figures, local politicians, the occasional signed headshot — and the whole place smells like beer and the fryer in a way that’s comforting rather than off-putting. Nobody is trying to make it look like anything other than what it is.
Jerry grew up in Indianapolis, worked in restaurants as a teenager, and never really left the business. He’ll tell you he almost sold the place twice, once in the mid-nineties and once around 2009, and both times he didn’t. He’s not entirely sure why. “It just seemed like it wasn’t done yet,” he said one afternoon, which is about as philosophical as he gets.
The food here is bar food done competently and without pretense. The mussels, steamed in white wine and garlic with good crusty bread on the side, are the thing people order more than anything else, and they’ve been on the menu in roughly the same form since the late eighties. They run about fourteen dollars and they’re worth every cent. The fish and chips are straightforward — real cod, real fry — and the burgers are thick and cooked to temperature without complaint if you ask. Lunch specials are posted on a chalkboard and usually involve soup, a sandwich, and a drink for around ten dollars.
The lunch crowd skews professional: public defenders, people from the various county offices nearby, occasional state legislators when the General Assembly is in session. Evening is different — younger, louder, more likely to involve a Colts game on one of the televisions behind the bar. Happy hour runs weekdays from four to six and is worth planning around if you work downtown.
What keeps people coming back isn’t innovation. It’s the opposite. Jerry knows his regulars by name and sometimes by order, and the staff tends to stay — his head bartender, a woman named Donna, has been there for over fifteen years. There’s a particular kind of ease that comes from a place that isn’t trying to reinvent itself every eighteen months, and Loughmiller’s has that quality in abundance.
It’s easy to walk past it, especially with the fancier lunch spots that have opened nearby in the last decade. That would be a mistake. This is a place that has earned its presence on that block, and the man with the clipboard at the end of the bar has a lot to do with why.
