Taking the Ball and Running

I love Indianapolis as a whole nearly as much as I love Speedway. It constantly perplexes me, however, that there isn't much that's particularly memorable about Indianapolis, food wise. For a long time, I have believed that perhaps that is because Indianapolis is a test market for regional or national restaurant corporations; they test new concepts here and have sufficient budget to both be able to fail without financial catastrophe while simultaneously setting an artificially high bar for survival for local concepts.

Recently, I read a great piece in the Urbanophile that made me question whether I had thought this entirely through. The piece discusses the diverging fortunes of Nashville Hot Chicken and Hoosier Breaded Pork Tenderloin.  I highly encourage anyone to click through and read the entire article. A few snippets should you forego the opportunity to click through:

First, about Nashville "Hot" Chicken:

In other words, it’s possible that this dish has been around a while in some form in the local black community, but what we know today as the Nashville hot chicken is from the 70s or 80s. A Midwestern reader with longstanding family ties to Nashville told me a while back that at least through the 1990s he never heard hot chicken mentioned there. I read that Nashville hot chicken is now supposedly popular around the south, but having spent extensive time in Alabama 10-15 years ago, I never once came across it there.

I have no reason to doubt this analysis, but then again I'm not from the South. I don't recall ever hearing about Nashville Hot Chicken until just a few years ago, though.

Now, as to the Hoosier Tenderloin:

the pork tenderloin is fairly ubiquitous in Central Indiana, where it is on practically every bar and grill menu. 

I can attest to that. I don't know how long the pork tenderloin has been ubiquitous in Indianapolis, but it's been at least the entire time I've lived here (since 2003).

The question, of course, is:

Why was Indianapolis unable to do with the tenderloin what Nashville did with hot chicken?

His answer, essentially, is that Indianapolis doesn't even try.

I again and again see that Southern cities start with little to nothing, and yet what they do have they treat as the greatest things of all time. As illustrated by Nashville hot chicken, they’ve also looked at their often neglected black community as a source of local cultural identity.

The Midwestern cities not only fail at this consistently, they typically don’t even try. There are tons of regional food products in the Midwest – Chicago style dogs, St. Louis pizza, etc. – but other than Chicago’s deep dish pizza, they have been dramatically underexploited in the marketplace even as these cities say that they are very keen to raise their brand profiles.

Interesting.

Being a litigator (and thus having nothing whatsoever to do with tourism, or the friendlier side of humanity generally) I don't really know what to say about this. Nonetheless, it is worth considering. It also gets me a-thinking about what it is, aside from racing, that Speedway hangs its hat on. I get that the 500 is, in the immortal words of Joe Biden, "a big f**kin' deal." Nonetheless, what is the "thing" about Speedway during the other 350 or so days per year? Food? Festivals? Sport? Music?