Couple Working Together Serving Culinary Creations

Article by Dave Kurtz | KPC News | September 24, 2021

AUBURN — Success by subtraction has added up to 20 years in business for Sandra D’s Italian Garden restaurant in Auburn.

Founders Sandy and Bentley Dillinger now make up the entire staff of the 30-seat restaurant. They also have pared their hours to four days a week and trimmed their menu to their greatest hits.

Running a restaurant was not the plan when the Dillingers bought a former appliance store on South Main Street in the late 1990s. Built a century earlier, it once housed the grocery store and upstairs home of Auburn Mayor Lodie Potter.

However, renting the building was “not a fun time,” and Bentley “was working in a warehouse and hated it,” Sandy recalled.

“I said to him one day, ‘We should forget about all the renters — the tenants aren’t working out —and put a little restaurant in there,’” she said.

“‘You’re crazy!’ is what I said,” Bentley remembered.

But Sandy’s plan was not so half-baked. Bentley held a culinary arts degree from Ivy Tech and had worked as head chef for Greenhurst County Club in Auburn from 1990-1999. The club is where he met Sandy, who was its office manager at the time.

After a year of remodeling their building, the couple blended their culinary and business skills to open Sandra D’s in July 2001. Ambitiously, the restaurant featured an extensive menu for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and their workdays ran from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m.

“Those hours, by the way, landed him in the hospital. He was in intensive care for a week, and another week in the hospital,” Sandy said about Bentley.

When he returned to work, the couple made the first of their strategic subtractions, eliminating breakfast from the restaurant’s day.

Another decision refined the menu to Italian specialties in 2007. They trimmed their supply chain by making their own bread, sauces and salad dressings.

The restaurant’s cuisine and cozy atmosphere earned a pair of rare five-star reviews from a Fort Wayne publication.

Among the culinary standouts, Bentley’s seafood lasagna, a specialty since 2012, sells out every Friday. It features scallops. shrimp and crab.

“The crab sauce is over the top,” said Sandy, who encouraged her husband to invent the recipe.

Bentley makes his fettuccine alfredo sauce to order. His creamy raspberry and bleu cheese dressing are made daily “from scratch.” At Sandy’s suggestion, they bake their own breadsticks.

“One of the things people love is the creativity. We try really hard to think of new ideas … and new ingredients and put them together, and people love it,” Bentley said. “We pride ourselves in the homemade … freshness … coming up with new ideas.”

The restaurant does not have a walk-in cooler or freezer, “so our stuff’s got to be fresh in, fresh out. We’ve got to rotate quickly,” he said. “People know that when they come in here, they’re getting fresh food.”

Everything was looking up for the restaurant until a cold day in 2014, when more than 7,000 gallons of water came flooding down from burst pipes on the building’s second floor. The damage forced Sandra D’s to shut its doors for four months.

“We thought we were finished,” Sandy said. However, “Our good customers kept calling and encouraging” them to reopen.

Another setback came in 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic limited business to carry-out service only.

“We were shocked at the community — how they supported us. … One lady bought $500 worth of gift certificates just to help us out,” Sandy said.

The Dillingers waited until last October — long after most restaurants — to reopen for indoor dining.

“There’s only two of us,” Bentley said, and they could not afford to get sick. “We played it pretty cautious, and it paid off. We stayed well.”

Even before COVID-19 hit, the Dillingers had reduced their hours to weekends-only in 2019. They added Thursday lunch hours after reopening last fall.

“The other days, we’re usually still here, anyway, getting ready for the following week,” Sandy said.

In the evenings, Sandra D’s closes between 7 and 8 p.m., and in another step toward keeping it simple, the Dillingers have stopped taking reservations.

“Come early — if you come early, you’re safe,” Bentley advised.

Their slimmed-down menu now fills only two letter-size pages.

“These are the things that sell,” Bentley said about the list. “We basically have whittled it down for the last 20 years to these items.”

Although Sandra D’s draws diners from a wide radius and ranks No. 1 among Auburn restaurants on

Tripadvisor.com, Bentley said they’re “never adding on, don’t want to — like it small.”

He added, “We’re not here to make a million. We’re here to make a living … and we want to have fun doing it. … Our goal is to get to know the people who come in here. We get to know them personally, and we just feel like that’s a huge blessing.

“We really feel like God has blessed us and kept us going,” he said.

The Dillingers give back in gratitude with their monthly Soup for the Soul events, when they prepare several creative soups and serve them for donations. Since October 2018, they’ve raised $34,000 for local charities.

These days, when customers ask Bentley how he’s doing, “He’ll say, ‘I’m living the dream,’” Sandy said. “He sounds sarcastic, but he really means it.”

“I really do mean it,” Bentley agreed.

At Sandra D’s, he said, “When you are waited on, you’re waited on by the owners, We take pride in what we do.”

Article source: https://www.kpcnews.com/thestar/article_6c67b9c6-3768-5b84-be31-7fbd16a66d18.html