Order a latte at Toasty Ember most mornings and you're standing in line behind the same regulars, waiting on the same espresso machine, in a space that still smells like whatever came out of the oven an hour ago. It's the kind of stop that anchors a Fortville morning: fire-roasted beans, a pastry case, a barista who knows your order. What most people in that line don't realize is that three months ago, the same family opened a second business four doors down, and it doesn't open until the sun starts going down.
That's the story Fortville residents have mostly missed, because it happened in two separate announcements, eight months apart, and nobody connected them out loud. The Fisher family, who opened Ember Coffee Works (the sign says Toasty Ember) at 240 S Main St in October 2025, spent the first half of 2026 turning the former Wine Garage space at 305 S Main St into something new. It opened in June as 305, a wine and cocktail lounge with a kitchen behind it. Same family. Same block. Opposite ends of the clock.
The Family Behind Both Ends of the Day
Mike Fisher runs 305 as owner and executive chef. His daughter Jordan is co-owner and chief mixologist. The kitchen leans on Mike's Italian and German family background, a tradition that traces back to his mother and a brother who spent time as head chef at a Michelin-recognized restaurant in San Francisco before it landed with Mike's daughters, Jordan and her sister Taylor. The Fishers describe themselves as longtime Fortville residents who wanted to put that background into the town's own walkable Main Street rather than somewhere with more foot traffic and less history attached.
That's worth sitting with for a second. This isn't an out-of-town restaurant group testing a satellite location. It's a family that already had a coffee shop on the block choosing to open a second, entirely different concept fifty yards away, with a different name, a different clientele, and a different hour of the day.
Here's how the two businesses actually split the day:
| Toasty Ember | 305 | |
|---|---|---|
| Address | 240 S Main St | 305 S Main St |
| Opened | October 2025 | June 2026 |
| Hours | Mon 7am-3pm, closed Tue, Wed-Sat 7am-3pm, Sun 8am-2pm | Evenings, with programmed music nights |
| What it is | Specialty coffee, house-roasted beans, scratch pastries | Wine, cocktails, and shareable small plates |
| Who's behind it | Mike Fisher's family | Mike Fisher (chef) and daughter Jordan Fisher (mixologist) |
Toasty Ember closes at 2 or 3 in the afternoon every day it's open. 305 doesn't start until the kind of hour when the coffee crowd has long since gone home. Between the two, the same storefront family covers most of Main Street's waking hours, morning pastry case to late wine pour, without the two ever actually overlapping.
The Old Wine Garage Becomes Something Bigger
The building at 305 S Main used to be the Wine Garage, a narrower concept built mostly around bottle sales. What the Fishers built in its place is more of a gathering room. The menu runs on composed small plates meant to be shared across a table over a couple of hours rather than ordered and cleared quickly. The drink list splits between curated wine and cocktails built with the kind of intention you'd expect from a mixologist rather than a bartender working fast on a busy Friday.
The part that separates 305 from a standard wine bar is the music calendar, and it's a real one, not a placeholder. Late August 2026 already brought Hunter & Gage Lambert playing an afternoon set and Jessie Phelps performing on the 305 Stage as part of the Kammy's Kause benefit, and the calendar carries into September with Thursday night jazz and blues sets from local musicians including Joel Gragg and Doug Henthorn, plus a Friday show from Tommy Baldwin. This isn't background noise piped through speakers. It's a working stage with a rotating bill, in a building that spent its previous life as a bottle shop.
Six businesses on one short stretch of Main Street. One family owns two of them, and between the two, they've claimed both ends of the day.
The Rest of the Five-Minute Walk
305 didn't open into a vacant block. Fortville's Main Street already had a working evening scene, and understanding where 305 fits means knowing what it's fitting into.
Taxman Brewing Co. sits at 29 S Main St in two historic buildings, one of them the town's old jail. The Belgian-style brewery's beer program picked up a bronze medal at the 2015 Great American Beer Festival before the Fortville location opened its doors in 2017, and it's stayed the block's anchor ever since, with a seasonal menu and a bar built for lingering.
FoxGardin Kitchen & Ale, at 215 S Main St, runs a New American menu with live music on select nights and a strictly 21-and-over dining room. Cortona's Italian Cuisine & Wine Bar, at 209 S Main St, is run by chef Simone Lucarini, who grew up in the actual town of Cortona in Tuscany before moving to the United States in 2015 and settling in Fortville with his wife, Elizabeth. A few blocks over on Broadway, Denver's Garage Pizza & Brews serves pizza and beer out of a converted 1956 service station.
Walk the block and the sequence looks something like this on a given evening: Toasty Ember has already closed for the day, its morning rush a memory. Sunrise Donuts, the town's other early anchor, closed even earlier. By the time FoxGardin's kitchen is turning out dinner and Taxman's bar is filling in, 305 is just opening its doors for the night, often with a set already booked on the calendar. None of these businesses compete directly for the same hour. They stack.
Down Broadway, a Different Kind of Saturday Night
Main Street isn't the only place in Fortville building a nightlife identity. A short drive down Broadway, at 738 W Broadway St, Moon Drops Distillery has been distilling bourbon, vodka, rum, and its own flavored moonshine blends since 2019, using Indiana-grown grains run through a copper still the owners nicknamed Big Momma. It's a family operation in its own right, built by two families who started making cocktails around a bonfire before turning it into a working distillery with a tasting room.
Moon Drops has built its own weekend habit around live music every Saturday night, and the brand has grown well past a single tasting room. Their ready-to-drink moonshine blends now sell in Meijer stores across Michigan and Ohio, and the distillery holds a sponsorship with the Indiana Pacers. It's a different kind of Saturday than what's happening on Main Street. Where 305 and Taxman are built around sitting at a table, Moon Drops is built around the tasting room and the still tour, a slightly more industrial, slightly louder version of the same idea: a family business turning a good drink into a reason for people to stick around.
Two Blocks, One Family, All Year
None of this changes overnight and none of it needs to. What's changed is that Fortville's downtown now runs on a schedule instead of a single peak hour. A resident who wants a full day on Main Street can start with coffee at Toasty Ember before 9, run errands or grab lunch at FoxGardin or Cortona's, and end the night four doors down at 305 with a glass of wine and a set from whoever's booked that week, all without leaving one short stretch of sidewalk, and all funneling back to the same family at both ends.
That's the piece worth knowing if you've only ever thought of Toasty Ember as the coffee place. These days it's one half of a two-business bet that Main Street could support a full day's worth of reasons to stop in, and three months into the second half of that bet, 305 is already drawing its own crowd on a Thursday night.
If you're already calling Fortville home and want more of this kind of on-the-ground read on what's changing downtown, or you're weighing a move within Fortville itself and want someone who actually knows which end of Main Street to point you toward, reach out to Reggie Jackson for a free neighborhood consultation.
