Published: January 30, 2006 10:58 am            

Artie's Tenderloin

Community fixture for seven decades

Central Indiana is filled with tiny little restaurants where the patrons and owners know each other by name.

Little diners and pubs dot the street corners, and in the last year I've been to a lot of these places to review restaurants or just to say hello.

They've been around, it seems, as long as anyone can remember. Stepping into Artie's Tenderloin, a Kokomo staple since 1938, I felt like I'd stepped back in time.

Danny Kelley has owned the 922 S. Main St. restaurant for the last six years, and his aunt an uncle owned it for 14 years before him.

"I think a lot of it is just the atmosphere and the people here," Kelley said one morning, while taking orders and refilling coffee cups.

Just a handful of little booths line the wall of the narrow little diner. On any given day, regulars sit on plush bar stools that line the counter, talking to employees as they cook or sopping up the last bit of gravy with their biscuits.

And from the early hours of the morning to the soft dusk of the evening, there are regulars at Artie's.

"It's about like a big family reunion in here every day," Kelley said.

While the atmosphere is both warm and inviting, let's not forget about the cooking. It's all home cooking, like mom used to make, Kelley said.

The restaurant rotates specials every weekday -- its selections are favorites like ham and beans, corn bread, baked tenderloin, pot roast, meal loaf, salmon patties, chicken and noodles or steak. Those hearty favorites will only set you back $5.30.

"Five bucks will get you full," Kelley said with a laugh.

Now, I've been in Indiana for a year. It's a place where our state slogan should read "Indiana: Where we pound our meat flat and fry it."

In that year, I've been holding off on eating two things -- biscuits and gravy, and a breaded tenderloin. There was a little pressure for my first tenderloin experience. I didn't want to go willy-nilly, wildly eating tenderloins, just for the sake of it. I wanted my first tenderloin choice to be special.

And this week it was.

With a crispy breading and my choice of toppings, I can't believe I've never had one of these sandwiches before. After a couple of crispy fries and a little of their chocolate cake, I think I've graduated to Honorary Hoosier.

And after my trip to Artie's, it feels like it's always been that way.



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