Martha Hoover is one of the original trailblazers of Indianapolis dining. She was a visionary, creating trends and helping to build the modern food scene long before we had the words for it. Despite growing an empire of restaurant concepts, with Café Patachou becoming the blueprint for today’s neighborhood cafés, her first Cafe Patachou at 49th and Penn opened its doors back in 1989. It was a different world entirely—especially for restaurants, women in business, and for food.
In the decades since, Hoover has racked up national acclaim, from James Beard Award nominations to nods in Food & Wine, InStyle, and just about every list celebrating the women reshaping food and business. 2024 proved to be a pivotal year when she strategically partnered with a private equity group and sold much of the ownership of her hospitality group, marking the end of one chapter and the beginning of a new frontier.
Because Hoover isn’t riding off into the sunset—she’s gearing up for what’s next. We caught up with her to look back at the road she’s traveled and to explore what this next horizon holds.
CT: Can you take us back to 1989 when you first opened Patachou?
MH: I had no experience in food. I had no experience in restaurants. I had no experience in running a for-profit business. And, when I decided to do the restaurant, I was unknowingly pregnant with my third child. I have often said, “If ever there was a recipe for disaster, that was it.”
CT: My first memory of Patachou is actually the tagline on the menu: “A Student Union for Adults.” It was such a welcoming phrase. Where did that come from?
MH: It came from my time at Indiana University. When I was a student in the very early 70s, there was no such thing as Starbucks or coffee culture. No such thing as third place, and truly, the student union was the beating heart of all campuses. I loved meeting my friends at the union in-between classes. It’s kind of our hub where we all went. I wanted the cafe in 1989 to feel like that hub and I didn’t have any other way to say it, so I said we were a “Student Union for Adults.”
CT: I love that it goes back to the beginning. Without the term or even the culture, what did you see in 1989 to see that a “third place” was a desire? How did you know this was the right track?
MH: Well, I didn’t, but through travels to other parts of the world I did understand cafe culture. Think about the cafes in Paris, for instance. They have been around for hundreds of years and those places were meeting places. They were hubs of neighborhoods and communities. I understood innately that restaurants had that ability. I didn’t understand it enough to articulate it properly, but I understood in terms of the emotionality I felt towards creating a neighborhood restaurant.
In terms of my own business, I really always looked at it like I was raising a twin. My son was born just as I opened the restaurant. I had those hard first years where there were lots of sleepless nights and colicky days, so to speak. Then we went into the terrible twos and then the toddler years and up to the teens and then early adult. When the company was 37 years old I felt like my ability to influence it had kind of disappeared. This child I had raised, being the company, was very much a fully formed adult and on its own. So, I know that seems like a silly analogy, but they’re very closely aligned. There is something remarkably maternal about hospitality. We used to try to hide the maternalness of hospitality and I think that all of the values that I put into my business of treating people fairly, treating people with respect, and creating sacred spaces where people felt safe, that really came from just being a mother and understanding what children, what families, and what humans need.
CT: Another thing that wasn’t around in 1989, but somehow you must have had a crystal ball, was farm-to-table. It didn’t become a phrase until what feels like 20 years later. What was procurement like in 1989?
MH: You know how two different things can be true? It was remarkably simple, the idea. I thought, “This is how I eat at home. This is how I feed my family. This is how I feed my guests. This is my expectation regarding the quality of food.” The procurement was complex because food distributors in the city had not yet understood the value of quality purchasing and quality supplying. In the early days, I had to go directly to providers. For instance, we served field greens right from day one. No produce house in the city sold field greens. So I had to go to the airport almost daily to pick up field greens, which meant that they were really expensive and really considered luxe. These are things now that you can now find on any salad bar or in any grocery store. But in 1989, people weren’t used to even eating field greens. Piazza Produce once told me that I introduced Indiana to arugula and I took that with such pride.
CT: Thank goodness for that! The arugula salad is such a perfect, bright side to my personal favorite at Patachou—the chicken salad. As a longtime food writer, I keep a pulse on food media and it was around 2015 that I saw you at a conference alongside Ina Garten. That is when I started to put together that you–and my favorite brunch spot–were doing things out of the ordinary not just in restaurants, but also in the broader food world, especially as a female leader. When did it click for you that the things that you were doing were not just unique to Indianapolis, but truly notable on a national scale?
MH: You know, one of my big business regrets is that I did not understand how distinguished my business was, not just for the city and not just regionally, but nationally. We really were ahead of almost all trends. We were ahead of menu trends. We were ahead of procurement trends. And, we were ahead of business ethics and values trends. Had I understood how we were doing things that really set us apart, I think I would have been more aggressive about talking about what we were doing in Indiana. We have, until very recently, been kind of skipped over as a culinary community and that’s just ridiculous.
CT: You just mentioned your before its time stance in regards to business and values. There is major work that you’ve done for employee rights as well as bringing the understanding that a restaurant job is a career. It’s not something you’re doing as the stop to the next thing.
MH: The restaurant industry is a remarkable employer. The idea that working in restaurants is everyone’s Plan B, and it’s just for the gig economy, is just absolutely wrong. Most people in the restaurant industry stay in the restaurant industry their entire working lives. My idea was always, this is a profession and it requires professionalism.
CT: Tell us more “A Longer Table” (Formerly Patachou Foundation):
MH: When I decided that the company needed to take a bolder stance in our commitment to our community it made sense for us to do something that was remarkably food-centric. The biggest need in the community, I felt, was feeding children properly. The organization at Longer Table is centered in the school cafeterias. Scientifically, it is proven that when young children eat well, they also perform better in school. Then when you take that simple scientific fact and compare it to the fact that children get at least 50% of their caloric intake, if not more, at school. So, you take those two facts side by side, and the intersection is that when schools feed children whole, not processed, high-quality ingredients. That doesn’t mean luxury: It means nutrient-dense, fresh foods. When a school feeds children properly, the kids actually perform better. And when children perform better, their opportunities for life improve.
Hunger relief really needs permanent solutions as opposed to band-aid solutions. A distinction of A Longer Table is that we are looking for full-circle solutions to hunger issues, as opposed to just creating a Band-Aid fix. Let’s change the entire outlook. Let’s feed children properly, with dignity and tasty food that is culturally aligned at the schools. Let’s do it with whole foods, and then let’s watch what happens. We are being rated and ranked, and we are being tested by outside organizations including Riley Children’s Hospital, IU Health, and Indiana Department of Health. What we know is that in the schools where we serve children, they have better attendance and significantly less food waste. They have greater participation in the cafeteria programs and they have better reading scores. They have better health outcomes with fewer trips to the nurse’s office and fewer disciplinary outcomes. It’s a win-win.
I think this can be more than a local model. It can be a regional or national model for what businesses can become in their community. I think A Longer Table can be a type of model for what school and school food could be.
I love supporting other independent restaurants and I think we have really come so far in terms of our city’s culinary scene. Restaurants are culinary culture points, right? Restaurants matter to a city. Restaurants matter to neighborhoods. A single restaurant can transform a neighborhood. And, a single restaurant can transform people’s lives. Once neighborhoods and people’s lives are transformed, a city can be transformed. So, restaurants truly are cultural currency. The more sophisticated a restaurant scene is in a city, it usually means other things for a city. It usually means that there is a more sophisticated art scene and more sophisticated music scene. Food is really important to all communities and their heartbeats.
CT: The restaurant industry was a great place for your career for 36 years, but now your days look different. You partnered and sold ownership of your many restaurants, not just Patachou, to private equity in 2024 and have a new series of projects. What prompted the change and what are you up to?
MH: To be completely honest, I gave Patachou everything I had for 36 years and I really wanted to do something else. I didn’t realize how badly I wanted to do something else. I sold the majority of the company and I am not involved in operations of the day to day. The transition happened and my identity was derailed. And I thought, you know, this idea that you have one chance at one identity in life is so wrong. So, I created an umbrella company called The MSH Collective and there are a couple of projects underneath The Collective that I’m working on. One is a podcast called “The Aftermath of an Exit.” Originally, it was about me understanding the change in my identity from going from being “The Queen of Patachou,” so to speak, to not being identified as having anything to do with the company. That change in identity was really jarring. But, I have never thought that I was such a unique person that I was the only one who was going through things. I wanted to know how other founders navigated those exit experiences. But now, of course, I realize it’s no different than navigating any exit experience, not just those of a founder. And, then you know that statement, “This isn’t my first rodeo?”
CT: Yes. Of course. And, I saw the clever branding on The MSH Collective website. Immediately, I needed to know more. Tell me, what is Second Rodeo about?
MH: Well, this is literally my second rodeo. I went deep into this Second Rodeo idea and I am creating a direct to consumer food brand that will launch sometime in the second quarter of 2026. We are waiting on packaging, nutritional information, all that stuff, and we’ll have a direct-to-consumer channel for people to buy some things that are really important to me. Did you see the logo?
CT: The woman on the horse? I did! I loved it.
MH: I really loved that image. I loved that woman on a bucking Bronco because so much of my life has felt like I’m balancing so many things while riding a Bucking Bronco. Also, it harkens back to my youth. There were a couple of women who were truly outsiders. One was Annie Oakley, who was a remarkable character. Talk about someone who literally carved a million different identities for herself, went against culture, went against the grain, and accomplished so much in her life. I’m in my 70s and I’m proud of that. I am stirring up what people think about when they think about somebody in their 70s. I want to be proof that you don’t have to become irrelevant and invisible as you age, especially as a woman.
This idea of balance, to me, means that women have to carry the entire mental load in not just their households but also in businesses that we own and operate. It’’s a difficult subject to really have people understand that there’s never an even balance.
When I first started out with 3 young children, Sarah was the oldest, then Rachel, then David, I happened to read in Women’s Wear Daily. Back in the day when it came in that great big, print format there was an interview of the fashion designer Sonia Rykiel. She was a single mother with 3 daughters running–then–a major fashion house in Paris and I was a huge fan of hers.
I read this interview of Sonya Kykiel, where she was asked about motherhood and its impact on her business. It was maybe the early 80s and Women’s Wear Daily asked her how she did it. Sonya said that her biggest frustration is that when she’s at home with her children, she was always thinking of the business. And, when she was at the business, she was always thinking of her children. And it made me really reflect on this idea that there is no perfect balance. It’s all a matter of prioritizing and doing what works for a woman and her particular ambitions and choices of the identities that she wants to hold. Having my own identity, apart from being a mother, was very important to me. I needed my identity to be not just an extension of children, spouse, and home. It was always really important to me to carve out an existence that was independent and my own.