The billboard just southwest of Ft. Wayne, Ind., reads: “NEW YORK, PARIS, ROANOKE. World-class dining 10 minutes down U.S. 24 West. Joseph Decuis.”
The curious will take the Roanoke exit, slow into town on Main Street, and head down the hill to the three-block-long central business district. Instead of the boarded-up storefronts they might expect in a small Midwestern town, they see spruced-up buildings, period lampposts, young trees, flowers and new sidewalks.
They pull up in front of a stone structure, once a bank, where a discreet sign identifies Joseph Decuis, Roanoke’s answer to Charlie Trotter’s.
If they have a reservation (strongly recommended), they’ll hand their keys to the valet parking attendant and step into this elegant restaurant that Indianapolis Monthly calls “one of the finest in the state” and that has locals marveling at what has happened to their little town. Says Town Court Judge Bobby Turpin, “It is putting Roanoke on the map. I hear nothing but praise.”
A gourmet restaurant didn’t just happen in this 152-year-old town. It evolved from an exclusive club for clients of American Specialty Companies, a Roanoke-based business engaged in sports and entertainment risk services worldwide. That a cosmopolitan company established its headquarters in a Hoosier village is a curiosity as well. In the corporate offices across Main Street from the restaurant, CEO Pete Eshelman explains how it came about.
“Our business is a great example of a business that could be located anywhere, and we found that a small-town environment helped us facilitate our goals,” he says. American Specialty provides risk- management services for large events (among them Atlanta and Salt Lake City Olympics and Special Olympics World Games), professional and amateur sports, motor sports and entertainment facilities.
Eshelman, 49, has spent his adult life in sports, first as a player, then a businessman. A minor-league pitcher in the New York Yankees system, he was sidelined by a shoulder injury, then hired by George Steinbrenner to work in the Yankees front office. It was there he recognized a need for a business dedicated to professional sports disability coverage, and he started one in 1977 in Boston. In 1986, he became CEO of a large Ft. Wayne insurance company affiliate, then in 1989 founded American Specialty with two partners in the basement of his country home north of Roanoke.
Eighteen months later, they were having growing pains and looking for office space. “We wanted to stay in the area,” he says. “We needed a place close to the [Ft. Wayne] airport. And at the time, we needed a place that was cheap.”
Roanoke’s hardware building was closing and the building was for sale. It filled the bill. Another plus was lack of traffic: Roanoke is a one-stoplight town.
Positive work ethic
Eshelman also cites work ethic as a factor in choosing to grow in Roanoke rather than in a city office park. “I think in smaller, rural America, work is important to people. It’s more than just making a buck,” he says. And there was something else — a certain charm. “Back then,” Eshelman says, “you could see that Roanoke was a town in disrepair, but it had a lot of potential. My wife, Alice, and I are fixer-uppers. We could see through the fake facades.”
In the last dozen years, the company has grown dramatically and has fixed up and now occupies much of Roanoke’s commercial center. American Specialty, with 115 employees and sales of nearly $100 million in 2001, now owns 13 buildings and a public village green and soon will open a bed-and-breakfast inn. The Joseph Decuis restaurant employs another 35 people.
Although some community leaders welcomed American Specialty, not everybody rolled out the red carpet. Eshelman recalls, “As we expanded again and again, you’d hear, `Are these young people going to buy the whole town and control everything?'”
Now most residents have come around. Town clerk-treasurer JoAnne Kirchner-Haack says Roanoke was the fastest-growing town in the county from 1990 to 2000, with a population increase of 16 percent. She credits American Specialty for playing a large part in making Roanoke a desirable place to live and contrasts the downtown streetscape of today with that of 1990, when, she says, the buildings were almost beyond the point of restoration.
The town and the local school also have benefited from increased real estate and payroll tax revenue. “I don’t know who else would have come in and committed to a town the way they have,” Kirchner-Haack says.
Power of the people
Eshelman chaired the downtown beautification effort that began about a decade ago. But he credits the townspeople for making the privately financed project successful. Property owners built new sidewalks; families, organizations and individuals bought trees and lampposts and brick pavers. “To raise $100,000 in a town like this is huge,” he says.
Roanoke Town Council recently approved for 2003 its first-ever $1 million budget. American Specialty sponsors an outdoor Independence Day concert by the Ft. Wayne Philharmonic Orchestra, which last summer drew an audience of 1,200 to Main Street.
Eshelman’s impact on Roanoke and the region has been not only in economic development but also in preservation of historic buildings and instilling home town pride in residents, according to Mark Souder, representing Indiana’s 4th District. He recently presented his Appleseed Award to Eshelman for his contributions to Roanoke. The award is named for Johnny Appleseed, a legendary 19th Century pioneer who distributed apple seeds and sprouts across northern Indiana and Ohio.
“He could have located his business anywhere, but he chose to adopt this little town,” Souder says. “He’s revitalized the town. In order for a small town to survive, this is the type of corporate commitment you have to have.”
Eshelman’s pride in the town is obvious.
“We like it here,” he says. “We do business with people from all around the world. They come here from London or Los Angeles, and they love it.”
It was the comfort of those travelers who spurred Eshelman to establish a private club where they could be wined and dined without leaving town and stay overnight in the company’s corporate suites. Other business leaders got wind of the restaurant with its own chef and asked to use the club. Then came public demand.
Naysayers predicted failure for the gourmet restaurant when it opened to the public in 2000. Now, Eshelman says with a satisfied smile, Joseph Decuis (named for his Creole ancestor in Louisiana) has created a destination: “It’s bringing in people from a large geographic area to a little town they’ve never been to.”
Eshelman’s wife, Alice, 47, is the proprietor of Joseph Decuis. An enthusiastic hostess, she serves a soupcon of Roanoke’s past along with a tour of the 130-seat establishment. The Club Creole, a formal dining room and bar, occupies the historic State Bank of Roanoke, built in 1922. The main vault now is a cigar humidor, and the safe-deposit-box vault holds part of the restaurant’s 3,000-bottle wine cellar, which for the past two years earned Wine Spectator magazine’s Award of Excellence.
Roanoke over Paris
Adjacent, in space that was once the town bakery, is the more casual Cafe Creole. Outside a Victorian conservatory is a New Orleans-like courtyard where there’s live jazz on summer weekends.
Eshelman and executive chef Lisa Williams take pride in their guest book signed by people from all over: “We came here instead of Paris,” wrote one Washington, D.C., couple. “It was worth it.”
The raves are for an ambitious menu that Eshelman calls “contemporary American with classical foundations.”
Recent entrees included Szechuan pepper-crusted elk chop in a cherry-Cabernet reduction, and oven-roasted brace of quail wrapped in bacon and vine leaves. For starters, there’s pan-seared Hudson Valley foie gras, or a salad of bibb lettuce, king crab, mango and avocado with a curry dressing.
“It’s not steak and potatoes, which is real common to this area,” Charles Kaiser, 44, chef de cuisine, and Williams’ husband, notes dryly.
It’s also pricier. Expect to pay about $50 for dinner, plus wine, which could run from as little as $18 a bottle to more than $100.
Williams, 40, didn’t set out to be a chef. An art history and French major at Indiana University, she enrolled in a cooking school in Dijon, France, while on a study program. She remained in Europe for a while, working as a chef for a family in Florence, Italy, where she learned the regional cuisine of Tuscany, then returned to her native Ft. Wayne.
Roanoke’s a far cry from France and Italy, but Williams loves it: “My chef friends on the East Coast and Chicago consider me very lucky. It’s a dream come true — to be here and be constantly challenged and never have to compromise on quality.”
Not everybody likes the new Roanoke. Next to American Specialty’s employee fitness center, barber Rex Ottinger, 63, hears the grumbling in the shop he has had since 1962. “A lot of people resent the change,” he says.
“I don’t look at it that way, and most of the business owners share my view. We have a really good neighbor — American Specialty — that has really revived Roanoke. I think people resent losing their drugstore, hardware and other stores. They’re blaming Pete Eshelman for it, but those businesses were history before he came.”
But the ladies of the club — that’s the Better Homes Club, founded in 1932, whose youngest members are 69 — are not looking back. Over cake and coffee, 10 of them sit around the hostess’ dining room table and talk about Roanoke’s renaissance.
They are proud of their pleasant town with its well-kept older homes and two growing residential subdivisions. They are pragmatic about the passing of the old days, and they invite comparison with moribund towns with empty stores and crumbling sidewalks. They like to take visitors to lunch at Joseph Decuis and show off the town.
“On weekend nights,” says one, a twinkle in her eye, “it’s like a car show downtown. You see BMW’s, Mercedes, Lexus. …Who’d ever believe it?”
