Indiana could soon gain one or even two Buc-ee’s locations, but the Hoosier State already has restaurants built around mechanical orchestras, steelworkers and a diner delivered by railroad.
These five places turn ordinary meals into trips through Indiana’s industrial and roadside history.
Zaharakos in Columbus
Zaharakos is an ice cream parlor, restaurant and mechanical-music museum operating under one ornate roof.
The business opened in 1900 and still features a 50-foot mahogany backbar decorated with stained glass and mirrors. Customers sit among marble, onyx and Victorian-style fixtures while ordering sundaes, sodas, sandwiches and other fountain classics.
The strangest attraction is a restored 1908 Welte orchestrion. The enormous mechanical instrument produces the sound of an entire orchestra without requiring musicians.
Zaharakos also displays what it describes as the largest public collection of pre-1900 soda fountains.
Customers may arrive for ice cream, but they end up eating inside a working museum devoted to a nearly vanished form of American entertainment.
Industrial Revolution Eatery & Grille in Valparaiso
Industrial Revolution Eatery & Grille treats steelworkers like superheroes.
Life-sized ironworkers sit on a steel beam above the entrance, recalling the famous photographs of construction workers eating lunch high over New York City. Inside, brick, metal, reclaimed wood and industrial artifacts cover the dining room.
A model train circles the restaurant on an elevated track.
The menu continues the theme with names inspired by factories, construction and American industry. Meatloaf, pot roast, burgers and brick-oven pizza provide the type of hearty food that fits the surroundings.
It feels like a restaurant constructed inside an unusually cheerful steel mill.
Oasis Diner in Plainfield
Oasis Diner arrived in Indiana by train.
Mountain View Diners manufactured the prefabricated building in New Jersey and shipped it to Plainfield by railroad in 1954. The stainless-steel structure served travelers along U.S. Route 40 for decades before closing in 2008.
Preservation efforts saved the endangered building. It was moved approximately four miles, restored and reopened along the same historic highway.
Today, customers can order breakfast, burgers, tenderloin sandwiches and milkshakes inside an authentic midcentury diner rather than a modern imitation.
The restaurant’s weirdness comes from its survival. Indiana did not recreate a 1950s roadside diner—it picked one up, moved it and gave it another life.
The Rathskeller in Indianapolis
The Rathskeller brings a Bavarian beer hall into the basement of an Indianapolis landmark.
The restaurant opened in 1894 inside the Athenaeum, a German-American cultural center originally known as Das Deutsche Haus. It is widely described as Indianapolis’ oldest continuously operating restaurant.
Its dining rooms resemble a European inn, while the menu includes schnitzel, sausages, sauerbraten and German beer.
During warmer weather, the celebration expands into an enormous outdoor biergarten with a bandshell, dance areas and space for hundreds of guests.
Few American restaurants allow customers to eat German food in a 19th-century cultural center before joining a beer-hall party beneath the Indianapolis skyline.
Mug-n-Bun in Speedway
Mug-n-Bun preserves a method of restaurant service that has nearly disappeared.
Customers pull into a parking space, turn on their headlights and wait for a carhop to take their order. Food can be eaten inside, but traditionalists remain in their vehicles.
The drive-in opened as a Frostop during the 1950s and became Mug-n-Bun in 1960. Its specialties include homemade root beer, enormous pork tenderloin sandwiches, hand-dipped onion rings, coney dogs and milkshakes.
The tenderloin can extend far beyond the bun, creating the peculiar Indiana spectacle of a sandwich whose bread appears almost ornamental.
Mug-n-Bun feels less like a retro-themed restaurant than a roadside business that refused to leave the automobile age.
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