About Love Handle
Love Handle is the deli Indianapolis didn't know it needed and then, once it arrived, forgot it had ever lived without. Chef Chris Benedyk — a former counter employee at Goose the Market, then a two-year stint running an earlier Love Handle in Milwaukee — returned to Indianapolis with his wife Ally and opened the shop's first local location on East 10th Street in 2016. After two years there, they moved the operation to Mass Ave in 2018. The Food Network has profiled it. Indianapolis Monthly has put it on multiple lists. The restaurant remains, deliberately, a no-frills mom-and-pop storefront.
What Benedyk does inside that tight, unassuming room is what turns a sandwich shop into a destination. He is a chef working with the overlooked cuts of the animal — tongue, tendon, belly, heart — and deploying them with technique borrowed from the full spectrum of European and Eastern European delicatessen traditions. A schnitzel and waffles plate will appear one week and be gone the next. A pulled-chicken Hot Brown pays tribute to the Louisville original. House fermentation, in-house baked breads, and sides that nobody else in the city is making — popcorn dressed in nutritional yeast and schmaltz among them — mean the menu genuinely rewards repeat visits.
The name is a tribute, per Benedyk, to the two great loves of his life: his wife Ally, a former pastry chef, and the pleasure of eating too many sandwiches. That sensibility — serious about food, unserious about itself — runs through the whole operation. Ally's pastry program rotates through the dessert case daily; the daily lunch specials are posted to Instagram in the morning; the regulars have their orders memorized by the staff. The service is fast, the portions are honest, and the prices are calibrated to a neighborhood shop rather than a chef-driven concept. That discipline is part of what makes Love Handle sustainable in a way most chef-ambitious delis are not.
Love Handle is open for brunch and lunch only. Weekend mornings generate a line that is worth standing in; weekday late-mornings are the quieter move. Seating is limited — counter stools, a handful of tables, a small patio when weather allows. The carry-out business is substantial for good reason.
Why Love Handle for Solo Dining
Love Handle is the platonic ideal of a solo-diner sandwich stop. The counter format means eating alone is the format; the daily menu gives you something to read; the pastry case is the reason to linger over coffee. Benedyk's cooking is good enough to justify full attention, and the room is small enough that the regulars will start to recognize a weekly visitor within a month. For a mid-morning work break, a Saturday after the gym, or the lunch that needs to be the best part of a day, this is the correct address on Mass Ave.
What to Order
Whatever is on the daily board. Benedyk's specials — schnitzel and waffles when it appears, the Hot Brown when it cycles back, the occasional tongue sandwich — are the most ambitious and deserve first attention. Among the standing menu, the house sandwiches constructed on scratch-baked bread are reliably strong. Pair with the popcorn side and a pastry from Ally's case. Coffee is taken seriously. A second visit within the same week is the honest recommendation.
The Occasion
Love Handle is not a dinner reservation; it is a lunch ritual. Solo mid-day meals, small team lunches that want to stay bright, birthday brunches that value food over ceremony — all of those read correctly here. For a proper dinner on Mass Ave, book Livery; for counter brunch at a chef-driven room, try Milktooth. But for the best sandwich in Indianapolis, made by a chef who means it, this is it.