Published: June 05, 2008 03:21 pm      

Small-town restaurant celebrates third anniversary

COATESVILLE — Tucked away in the southwest corner of Hendricks County is the Bread Basket Café & Bakery, a small-town eatery that specializes in lunch cuisine.

Its location here on Main Street isn’t exactly bustling with traffic, so owner Judy Sexton said she relies mostly on word of mouth to attract customers.

“We’re not really on the path to much, so we’re definitely a destination,” she said. “We have such a wonderful customer base and they come in from all directions.”

Sexton moved to Coatesville from Westfield in 1988 and turned a vacant downtown apartment building into Bread Basket Café & Bakery on June 2, 2005.

“Westfield was getting so huge,” Sexton said. “We were looking for a quieter place to raise our daughter. My husband worked on the Westside at the time, so we thought we’d look west of the city. We didn’t intend to come this far out, but this is where we ended up.”

The location may be remote, but hungry visitors willing to make the trip out to Coatesville are rewarded with a unique menu that Sexton said is much different than your typical small-town fare.

“We don’t have fried foods,” Sexton said. “We prepare everything here ourselves. We bake all of our own pies and cakes and make our soups fresh daily. I buy organic produce whenever it’s available from a local organic grower.”

Sexton said customer favorites include chicken salad, roast pork, and fettucine alfredo. The Asiago apple salad is another specialty, with crisp apple wedges on mixed lettuce with spiced walnuts, berries, Asiago cheese, and raspberry vinaigrette dressing.

“Typically in a town like this you expect to find a lot of burgers and fries,” Sexton said. “The food here is a little bit different than what the town was accustomed to, so it took awhile for a lot of the local people to support us.”

The restaurant’s food was featured at last year’s Taste of Hendricks County event at Primo Banquet & Conference Center in Plainfield. More than 725 people attended, and $5,916 was raised for the Hendricks County Community Foundation.

“It was definitely exciting,” Sexton said. “We had not been involved in that before and I didn’t know what to expect. The next morning, the doors opened like flood gates and a mass of people came in who attended the event at Primo.”

Because the kitchen is so small, Bread Basket Café does not offer a dinner menu, but instead has nightly dinner specials of one or two selections. Five-cheese ravioli with portobella mushrooms and prime rib are among the dinner entrées offered.

“It’s different every night,” Sexton said. “The phone will ring and people will often ask what’s for dinner.”

Bread Basket Café & Bakery currently has 24 part-time employees, many of which come from area high schools Cascade, North Putnam, and South Putnam. Sexton said when the eatery opened three years ago, she figured it would just be her and three or four part-time employees.

“It has become a lot larger than I ever expected,” she said. “It’s almost a 24/7 operation.”

kevin.leibrock@flyergroup.com