Posted February 05, 2025in Lunch With...
Trang Pham and her sister, Thien Olson, are young immigrants making their way in entrepreneurial Iowa while also holding down impressive day jobs and becoming family nuclei. We asked them to lunch and met at Trang’s newest Eggroll Ladies café, in the Equitable Building. When I arrived, Trang explained that
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Posted January 01, 2025in Lunch With...
John Busbee has been covering, creating, managing, promoting and producing the Iowa art scene for more than five decades. He and I both have columns in CITYVIEW and radio shows on KFMG. I thought it was time to finally break bread together and asked him to lunch. We met at
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Posted December 04, 2024in Lunch With...
Allison Pohlman is Suzie Glazer-Burt Women’s Basketball Coach at Drake. Around events celebrating the 50th anniversary of women’s basketball at Drake, we asked her to lunch, and she chose Drake Diner. When Coach walked in, she was greeted by multiple staff on a first-name basis, or as Coach. The mother
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Posted November 06, 2024in Lunch With...
Teo Nguyen is a Minneapolis-based painter whose “The Politics of Worthiness” (PoW) visited Des Moines on a world tour reimagining how war is perceived. Jackie Akerberg is a wealth management guru, author of “The Clean Vegan Cookbook,” and creator of The Jackfruit Kitchen, a food blog with nearly half a
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Posted October 02, 2024in Lunch With...
Scott Carlson opened Des Moines’ first successful brew pub. Recently, he sold his share of Court Avenue Brewing Company (CABCO) to concentrate on Americana, Gilroy’s and the Iowa Craft Beer Tent at the fairgrounds, which he also founded. He has just completed many years of leadership with the Iowa Restaurant
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Posted September 04, 2024in Lunch With...
Charlie Sovich sold Charlie’s Filling Station two years ago after a 48-years-long run. We asked him to lunch and met at Manhattan Deli, where the sandwiches cover all traditional bases while occasionally pinch hitting out of their league, as it did recently with lobster rolls featuring Maine lobster. Lunch there
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Posted July 31, 2024in Lunch With...
Ben McCollum is Drake University’s new head men’s basketball coach. Previously, he won four national championships including three in a row at Northwest Missouri State. In town amongst recruiting trips to Atlanta, Augusta and Phoenix, we asked him to lunch and met at, where else, Drake Diner. That historic café
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Posted July 03, 2024in Lunch With...
Angela Harrington is a developer, hotelier and civic promoter of the I-80 corridor from Des Moines to Iowa City. We asked her to lunch and met at Panka Peruvian Restaurant, a marvelous, minority- and female-owned café on Ingersoll. Mariella Maya’s restaurant upgraded recently after she closed her rotisserie chicken shop
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Posted June 05, 2024in Lunch With...
Jacqueline Thompson is an ordained elder in the Iowa Conference of the United Methodist Church (UMC) and is pastor at both Burns UMC and St. John’s UMC. She grew up in Dayton, Ohio, a town that could be Des Moines’ twin sister in some of its similarities yet is quite
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Posted May 01, 2024in Lunch With...
C.J. Bienert is Des Moines’ chosen cheese monger. Through his Cheese Shop and Cheese Bar, he has enticed the city’s palate to appreciate distinctions between whey and casein proteins, goat’s milk and sheep’s milk fats, Pyrenees and Alpine terroirs, etc. He has promoted wine and cheese tastings to graduate level
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