• Lille Bønne is a new café and community center in Fletcher Place’s historic Danish church.
• Co-owner and Indy native Abby Reckard hopes the building can offer a new kind of gathering space more than 150 years after its construction.

Fletcher Place’s historic Danish church, built in 1872 by a small Danish Lutheran congregation, still has its original stained-glass windows and Indiana poplar hardwood floors. But not everything about the storied building has gone unchanged. The church’s coffee hour, for one, has made significant strides over the last century and a half.

Four years since its last worship service, the building has reopened as a public café and community center called Lille Bønne Community Living Room. Danish for “little bean,” Lille Bønne functions as a casual coffee, breakfast and lunch spot as well as a classroom, live music venue, yoga studio or whatever else the neighborhood asks of it.

“At the risk of trying to do and be too much for everyone,” co-founder Abby Maci Reckard said, “that’s kind of the goal.”

Reckard, who grew up on the northwest side, has lived in or near Fletcher Place for the last dozen years. She recalls taking walks through the neighborhood on summer evenings and hearing the mighty breath of the pipe organ spilling out through the church’s brick walls. In 2021 the church’s most recent tenant, the Church of Jesus Christ Apostolic Faith, announced it would move out with no sign of a successor.

At the time, Reckard was working from home while raising two pre-school-age kids with her husband, increasingly feeling like she was one stilted video call away from a Zoom-induced fugue state. She joked about repurposing the church for any number of less-than-holy pursuits, but behind those quips was a very real hunger for more genuine human connection. A few days after the property at 701 E. McCarty St. hit the market, Reckard went to her friend, neighbor and real estate agent Will Lonnemann with a 20-page business plan and the question, “How do we buy this church?”

The city eventually rezoned the church’s land as residential and its price dropped significantly amid a lack of buyers. With help from investor friend Phil Golobish, Reckard and Lonnemann paid around $235,000 for the building in 2023. In the more than three years since, they have poured a comparable sum into renovations.

Today, the former sanctuary houses an unusually charming café that seemingly answers the age-old question of what might have happened if Martin Luther got really into third-wave coffee. Lille Bønne sources its kaffebønner from longtime Fletcher Place roaster Calvin Fletcher, which guests can drink alongside a small food menu curated by chef Peter Blum, formerly of Duos Indy.

Blum’s offerings hit many of the familiar café beats − sandwiches, grab-and-go salads and a rotating soup of the day − with a few notable curveballs. One I tried during Lille Bønne’s soft opening was the smørrebrød, currently the café’s foremost nod to Scandinavian cuisine. Literally translated to “butter and bread” in Danish, smørrebrød refers to a vast array of open-faced sandwiches topped with anything from roast beef to hard-boiled eggs and whole prawns.

The debut smørrebrød at Lille Bønne featured tender shingles of sliced chicken dressed up with pungent pesto, a peppery scattering of arugula and bitey crescents of pickled red onion, all neatly pressed atop a slice of crackly rye toast and the requisite slathering of butter. The verdant pesto brings a nice zip to a cuisine not exactly famed for its explosive flavors, and I admire the architectural prowess required to keep the smørrebrød from collapsing into a meaty salad with one big crouton immediately upon tooth impact.

At $13, the smørrebrød is more likely to satisfy your intrigue than your hunger. That said, Lille Bønne does offer heftier sandwiches like roast beef and provolone or roast turkey and brie for $10. The house-made chicken salad sandwich ($13), served on a croissant from Leviathan Bakehouse, could range from a classic chicken-and-bacon situation to a turmeric-tinged curry chicken salad any given week.

For those with dietary restrictions, Lille Bønne offers a daily vegan soup ($5.50 to $9) as well as a vegan sandwich served between gluten-free slices of Indianapolis-based Native bread. The vaguely Levantine roasted tofu and hummus sandwich I picked up from the café’s grab-and-go case made me yearn for more plant-based alternatives on the menu, if only because Blum and I appear to have similarly extreme views on proper cumin dosage.

Lille Bønne’s menu is somewhat limited in scope and for good reason. Preserving the church’s historic qualities meant complying with its architects’ original vision, one that didn’t necessarily allow for an elaborate food and beverage operation. A small oven, a dishwasher, a pair of sinks and not much else constitute Lille Bønne’s kitchen, if you can call it that.

“That’s a closet,” Blum said of his new digs.

Since the pandemic closure of Duos, Blum has operated his Front Row Catering company out of a commercial kitchen space in the Carmel Palladium, which is where he now preps the bulk of Lille Bønne’s food items. Joining Blum to oversee the precious few square feet of café space is hospitality and events manager Ariel Hendrickson, who also serves as the co-owner of J’Adore with Bluebeard pastry chef Youssef Boudarine.

Not all Danish, but Dane-ish

Part of Hendrickson’s job at Lille Bønne is putting together its roster of alcoholic beverages, available throughout the day but which take center stage as the café transitions into more of a wine bar in the evenings. Most of the roughly 10 wines cost between $8 and $13 per glass, and you can also sample a selection of Danish meads ($6 for a 2-ounce pour), each with appropriately Nordic-sounding names like Odin’s Skull and Viking’s Blood.

For a different kind of liquid calories, Lille Bønne blends up a handful of 20-ounce smoothies ($9) that straddle the line between health food and dessert via straw. You can fortify your smoothie with a scoop of collagen or vegan protein powder for $1.50, which I respect as an attempt to meet the moment even if the furthest thing from my mind when I’m sitting in a beautiful historic building is whether my smoothie can get me absolutely jacked.

In the dessert/sweet breakfast category, customers can purchase pastries from Leviathan and cookies from Lemon Tree, the baking business Reckard and her mother, Liz, founded in 2011.

The hodgepodge of Lille Bønne’s food and drink offerings amount to what Blum called Danish-influenced, but not an attempt at a direct translation.

 “Because we can’t claim any authenticity,” Blum said.

Indeed, none of Lille Bønne’s founders have any Danish heritage. While renovating Lille Bønne, Reckard consulted with Danish American singer-songwriter Anita Lerche, who was recently installed as Indianapolis’ Honorary Consul of Denmark, to better understand the culture of the people who constructed the church.

Historical records suggest only about 300 Danes lived in Indianapolis in the mid-to-late 19^th century, making the church crucial as a gathering space for the small immigrant population.

Reckard and Lonnemann tapped Indianapolis-based Bohall Design and Fabrication to maintain as much of the church’s original character as possible, transforming pews into tables, shelves and countertops. The railing of the balcony that overlooks the sanctuary-turned-café space previously served as a communion rail, and a patron sipping coffee at the bar can look down and see the cross-sections of square-cut steel nails not used in construction since the late 1800s. Reckard was adamant that the crack in the plaster beneath the church’s highest window remain unfilled.

“There’s little nuances throughout the building that honor the history and the people who built it,” Lonnemann said.

Though the Holy Rosary-Danish Church Historic District may not be as tightly knit as it was 150 years ago, many of Lille Bønne’s Fletcher Place neighbors had a hand in its creation. In addition to coffee beans, Calvin Fletcher supplied Lille Bønne with secondhand equipment, and co-owner Jeff Litsey gave the staff a crash course in running a coffee program. Chilly Water co-owner Dan Kryzwicki helped construct the community center’s patio, and you’ll find a few of the brewery’s beers in Lille Bønne’s fridges.

In addition to yoga sessions, language courses and arts performances, Reckard plans to bring in experts to hold free classes on subjects like financial planning, car maintenance and how to combat food scarcity. These classes are one way Reckard hopes to benefit her community while managing a for-profit business. While she considers herself staunchly anti-capitalist, Reckard recognizes that it’s a lot easier to provide for your neighbor when you aren’t buried in debt, and renovating a historic building isn’t cheap.

“Money exists,” she said. “Business exists. We cannot escape that system, so how can we make it as ethical and sustainable and helpful as possible?”