Magdalena Brings the Spirit of New Orleans to the Midwest
NOLA bar pro Nick Detrich has returned to his hometown of Indianapolis and created a perfect representation of his second home in his first one.
Friends, I need to tell you: I recently had one of the most fabulous and delicious and most enjoyable meals of my past year. (I went back the following night for more. I would have returned a third night if my schedule had allowed.) And I had it in a somewhat unexpected city: Indianapolis.
Why was I in Indianapolis? That’s a story for another time. But within a day of returning, I spoke with three different New Yorkers, separately, who each told me they’d also been to Indy recently. Apparently life brings plenty of people there more often than you might guess.
I’d known going into this meal that it would be epic. You see, it was at a new restaurant—Magdalena—that’s helmed by Nick Detrich, a bartender whom you know from vaunted New Orleans spots Cure, Cane & Table, Manolito, and Jewel of the South.
He moved back to Indianapolis a few years ago for family reasons, where he “got bored,” he told me, and decided to create a new venture there. (Nick told me he’ll be splitting his time between Indianapolis and New Orleans going forward.) Magdalena opened in mid-November of last year and has quickly become one of the most well-regarded spots in town.
It’s NOLA through and through, though that shows up more in its vibe and hospitality and menu offerings than in any cheesy themed décor or music. There are, thankfully, no Mardi Gras beads on display, although there was a king cake baby adorning one of my cocktails. It’s a cozy spot—I forgot to count the number of tables, but there couldn’t have been more than ten or twelve, plus maybe eight bar stools—with brick walls and industrial ceilings and fairly simple, streamlined décor. At a glance, it could be a neighborhood date-night spot in Brooklyn.
While Nick is known primarily as a bartender, Magdalena is definitely more a restaurant than a bar. As much as New Orleans is a drinking town, it’s an eating town first, and this place reflects those priorities. The restaurant’s menu has a strong (although not exclusively) New Orleans inflection.
I’m sure you can’t go wrong with any dish, but an ideal meal would likely consist of the very most New Orleans-y plates. I ordered many too many and have no regrets about it, but a more reasonably sized ideal meal for two people (all dishes are meant to be shared) might involve the following: a half-dozen oysters (pray they have Murder Points from Alabama the night you’re there), sazerac-cured salmon, duck-heart pastrami, NOLA BBQ peel & eat shrimp, a wildcard dish (perhaps the gumbo, no longer on the menu when I was there, will make a return appearance?), and literally any dessert. (Note that the offerings shift slightly each night, so any specific dishes I mention might be gone when you dine there.)
Those shrimp are the most can’t-miss item on the menu: Our bartender told me that Nick once took a job at Pascal’s (home to NOLA’s most renowned version of the dish) for a few months just to learn its recipe for BBQ shrimp. At Magdalena, they’re served with a strip of house-made focaccia (rather than the traditional French bread, a welcome substitution) for mopping up the hearty sauce.
Now, let’s talk about the drinks. The cocktail menu is divided into four sections: classics, New Orleans classics, seasonal original creations, and a lively non-alc section.
There are also wines and beers on offer, of course, but I confess I didn’t pay them any attention.
The “Classics” section isn’t the usual standard recitation of martini, negroni, manhattan we’ve all come to expect. The selections veer a little off the most-trodden path, and include so many of my personal favorites it felt as though it had been custom-designed for me. You can expect to see an americano, mai tai, turf club, hotel nacional, and more in this section. Some ordinarily stirred drinks will be thrown—not for attracting TikTok attention, but because it’s the way it’s best done.
In the “New Orleans Classics” section you’ll see a sazerac done the way they make it at Jewel of the South, with rye, herbsaint, madeira, rancio sec, and Peychaud’s. There’s the requisite French 75 and, remarkably, a Ramos gin fizz (a drink that takes so long to properly make that most bars will tell you they can’t make one). It’s the section where you’ll also find the Carnival Time, a must-order—which isn’t yet a classic cocktail or even a modern classic, but it contains enough herbsaint (New Orleans’ version of absinthe) that it can’t possibly be from anywhere but NOLA and drinks like something that’ll survive the decades.
The current version of the seasonal section contains largely house riffs improving classics: You’ll recognize a gibson twist, a Mexican firing squad-meets-devil’s margarita, a last word-ish drink, and others.
You’ll want to start with the Glib Son with your round of oysters. It’s made with gin, blanc vermouth, and the same house-made mignonette that’s served in a dropper bottle with the oysters, and garnished with a house-pickled onion. You can go any way you like from there, but I’d say can’t-miss drinks include the house sazerac and that Carnival Time (created by Nick a dozen years ago).
It all adds up to a gleeful, comfortable, just-shut-up-and-eat-style meal, sophisticated in flavor but unpretentious in feel. It’s fun to form pairings between the drinks and food: a Glib Son with oysters, obviously; share the cara cara posset with chicory dates dessert with your date such that one person orders a citrusy cocktail (to drink with the posset), and the other gets the Lena vs Du Monde (which goes amazingly with the dates), share accordingly; etc.
But it's also a perfect place to simply go hog wild, forgetting all rules, and to have more food and more drinks, in any combination, than might ordinarily be advisable. New Orleans’ signature permissiveness is the overarching protocol here.
It’s a place for indulging in gluttony, for eating to excess and drinking to nearly so, simply because it’s all so delicious: It’s the New Orleans way.
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That said, let’s take a moment to discuss travel to Indianapolis, and Indiana in general, in the current moment.
I assume that most people who will be reading this are, like me, living somewhere other than Indiana. Thus, to visit Magdalena would require traveling to Indiana.
Which, to someone who (like me) is hugely in favor of, well, basic human rights, is a pretty discouraging proposition at the moment.
I booked this trip before the election. Before [looks around, waves hands] you know…everything.
The good news is, Indianapolis is a solidly blue dot within its red state. The city’s mayor is a Democrat with seemingly good intentions; businesses everywhere display LGBTQ+ flags (although the fact they’re necessary is a bummer). As a friend who lives there texted me: “Indiana might be a shit state but we’re a little blue heaven in the midst of all of it.”
The bad: At the state level, the government is a forerunner of implementing many Project 2025 plans that amount to human rights violations. (Forgive me, but I don’t have the emotional strength at the moment to type them all out here.) An actual, literal KKK rally was held in the northern part of the state while I was there, I’ve heard.
And the people? I ran into both types. I of course had the privilege of traveling as a white, cis person, accompanied by a white, cis person of the opposite sex; your own mileage may vary depending on your circumstances. I’d say 95% of the people I interacted with were what I would consider “normal,” or somewhere between obviously liberal and not obviously bigoted. Everyone else was pleasant enough to me, and I didn’t see any literal red hats, although some MAGA hecklers did their best to ruin a concert I attended.
I felt sick to learn, after I’d booked my room, that the full-of-character hotel I stayed at is owned by a billionaire who lives in Wisconsin and is the single largest political donor in that state. She did not donate those many millions to the good candidate, and I feel nauseated at the thought of contributing to her coffers.
How does one support a good restaurant in a mostly good city in a state that, at best, I don’t want to support financially, and at worst, might actually be literally dangerous to those who visit? I don’t have an answer, unless your superpowers include teleportation.
I guess the only thing you can do is to be aware of your choices. Be aware of the political leanings of the airline you choose, and the hotel you choose, and the other businesses you support. Go and don’t be shy, if/when asked and if you feel comfortable doing so, about saying where you’re from and what you believe, and then be sure to represent both as well as you can.