CITYVIEW’s 2024 Ultimate Place for Lunch

7/31/2024

It goes by many names: lunch, brunch, brown bag, high tea, luncheon, nuncheon, dim sum, almoço, déjeuner, mittagessen, hirugohan, obiad and smorgasbord, to name a few. 

But what’s in a name? The things we call lunch today evolved from the Spanish word lonja, which meant “slice of ham.” That connection goes back to the 16th century and became the English “lunch” by the early 19th. 

Similarly, the Swedish word smorgasbord evolved from words for “slice of bread and butter” and for “table.” Then it became an entire banquet table of small dishes. In Iowa, smorgasbords in Elk Horn, Roland and Huxley have given way to charcuterie boards and lost their association with Scandinavia. In Des Moines, they are most likely found in Italian, Spanish and French cafes, or in cheese shops and steakhouses. 

Las Vegas reinvents lunch 

Buffets are smorgasbords on steroids. They were an American invention, significantly a Las Vegas invention. Originally, they were loss leaders to lure gamblers into casinos. Now they are ubiquitous. In the 1950s and 1960s, Des Moines diners flocked to Winterset’s Gold Buffet, which augmented its reputation by buying on WHO radio. 

Today, buffets are mostly Chinese, often with mysterious labor forces and abundant “all you can eat” promises. If one interprets “ultimate” literally, Chinese buffets have longer endings than any other lunches. One popular social media meme shows a Chinese buffet’s sign reading “All you can eat not mean all day. You eat, you go.” My photographer for an obesity story in the 1990s asked where to shoot. I suggested one such buffet. Afterwards, he said he got everything he needed there. 

Opa! has Greek or Italian buffets four days a week. India Star, Chowrastha and Bawarchi serve weekday Indian lunch buffets. Lzaza has a daily Pakistani buffet. Spices of Nepal and Kathmandu offer weekend Himalayan buffets. Americana has a weekend buffet with bottomless cocktail options. Terra Grill and Chicago Speakeasy have lavish salad bars. Google searched out 14 Chinese buffets in metro Des Moines. And, of course, there are 550 Hy-Vee stores, most of which have Chinese buffets serving a la carte. Hy-Vee has won CITYVIEW’s “Best Chinese Restaurant” vote more than once. 

David Tsang, Stanford scientist turned food mogul, told me he made as much money with his Chinese buffet training company for supermarkets as he did by selling his House of Tsang line of products to La Choy. Our point is, in Vegas style, buffets are huge in every quantifiable manner. 

Lunch, literally

Other names for lunch combined words for “middle” and “day.” The German mittagessen, the Polish obiad, the Japanese hirugohan, and the Portuguese almoço all do that. In Cantonese, dim sum combines words for “point” and “heart,” as if invented for the movable carts of great dim sum palaces of Monterrey Park, San Francisco and New York. In the metro, Wong’s Chopsticks carries out weekend dim sum without the carts. 

The French dejeuner and the Norwegian frokost evolved out of words meaning “break and fast.” That was before two meals a day became three. 

Lunch has been served in many, always changing formats. Luncheonettes were a 1950s idea about the future, dispensing a la carte meals from automats. Those were early vending machines that occupied entire walls of urban restaurants that were unthinkable without waiters or checkout stations. 

Fast food chains ran them out of the big towns in the 1960s. Now, the fast food industry is bringing them back, with caution. McDonalds already has all-robot stores in Texas and Colorado but has pulled the plug on automated AI drive throughs.

Generational lunches 

The “Greatest Generation” celebrated victory in WWII by inventing the “three martini lunch.” That extravagance reinforced the Madison Avenue illusion that a booze buzz made one more creative. It riled President Kennedy, who futilely asked Congress to end its tax deductibility. Jimmy Carter made it a successful campaign strategy, pointing out that blue collar workers were subsidizing “$50 martini lunches” for white collar counterparts. 

His opponent, President Ford, proclaimed, “The three-martini lunch is the epitome of American efficiency. Where else can you get an earful, a bellyful and a snootful at the same time?” Ford was speaking to a receptive audience at the National Restaurant Association when he said that. 

For most Baby Boomers, lunch was synonymous with school cafeterias mostly preserved today in pop culture. “Napoleon Dynamite’s” underhanded cafeteria compliment to Deb — “You could be drinking whole milk, if you wanted to” — still triggers high school memories for anyone who ever worried about appearance. Marty McFly discovers his future father writing science fiction in the school cafeteria of “Back to the Future.” And Marty upgrades his estimation of his dad. “Mean Girls” uses the school cafeteria to illustrate the everchanging status in most everyone’s memories of high school. 

More than any TV show or movie, “The Office” demonstrated that life was a perpetuation of high school. In one episode of the American reboot of the show, Jan forces Michael to sit in the corporate cafeteria next to his nemesis Toby. Bobby Vee and John Loudermilk sang and wrote about the consequences of school cafeteria jealousies in “Stayin’ In.” 

The anti-three martini lunch

About the same time that lunch cafeterias lost their cool to the new phenomena of fast food and drive-ins, the power lunch was born. It was a refutation of the three martini lunch, credited to Alex Von Bitter when he managed the celebrity crazed Four Seasons, New York. Von Bitter famously told the New York Times about scrambling to find a table for Jackie Onassis when she showed up without a reservation. 

The “three martini lunch” was often accompanied by lavish tableside preparations. That made it hard to turn tables, even for Jackie O. Four Seasons’ power lunch was a challenge to Gerald Ford’s idea about efficiency. It was made to deliver access, sobriety, and lunch in less than an hour. Ruth’s Chris still has a “30 minutes lunch” menu in West Des Moines.

In Des Moines, power lunch has lost its greatest manifestations. The Cub Club used to draw judges, CEO’s, bank presidents and everyone who hoped to talk to them. All were attracted to the bargain prices. It died of COVID and a change of ownership. 

801 Chophouse used to reserve a table for R.W. Apple, both the frontpage political analyst and “food correspondent at large” for five decades at the New York Times. Its lunch service died of COVID, but its reputation is such that it opens for private lunches, including one this year for Donald Trump. 

Des Moines’ other celebrated power lunch spots — Jesse’s Embers, Java Joes, Alba, and Splash Oyster Bar — have not revived lunch services post pandemic. The cafeteria at the Iowa state capitol is closed at least till January. Baratta’s Café at the State Historical Building is only open every other Wednesday now. Centro has revived their lunch service but only on Thursday and Friday. Django tried but gave up.  

Other than Ruth’s Chris in the far west of the metro, and Destination Grille with its chic cabanas in Grimes, power lunch is most likely found in more casual digs at Gateway Market Café, Manhattan Deli, Little Brother, Maccabee’s Glatt Deli, Gilroy’s, Tumea & Sons, Latin King, Baratta’s, Skip’s, Nick’s, Lucca, La Mie, Trellis, Court Avenue Brewing Company, Drake Diner, Noah’s, Bubba’s, Fresko, Hotel Pattee Café, Chicago Speakeasy, Hilltop, Cooper’s Hawk and Americana. Promising newcomers Hugo’s, Roots 95 and the reincarnated Table 128 could add their names here. 

Brunch’s wild history

Brunch began in Victorian England and trended upward in Roaring 20’s America. At that time, it was perceived as a rich person’s thing, popularized in posh hotels when business travelers were gone and leisure travel was developing. Emily Post wrote about brunching with oysters, eggs, caviar and beautiful people at The Gramercy Park Hotel in 1923. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about The Plaza in New York and The Willard in Washington. 

The 1930s and its depressing economy made brunch a face-saving way to cut down from three to two meals a day, but at home. Brunch became a “Sunday after church” event in the 1940s when the first brunch cookbooks appeared, demonstrating its adoption by the middle class. 

Church attendance began a long decline after WWII, and brunch disappeared from hotels and restaurants. Gen X resurrected and expanded brunch in the 1980s. By the 1990s, American brunch was being offered on Saturday as well as Sunday, and restaurants embraced that trend. In the late 1990s, a concierge at the Pasadena Ritz Carlton told me that the hotel’s busiest times were its weekend brunches. 

After the millennium turned, brunch in America went international. Dim sum was no longer just for Chinese-Americans. Sunday morning hangover cures like menudo and pozole, were no longer just for Mexican-Americans. They, too, spread from Sunday to all weekend. 

Gen Z made lunch greener, more natural and healthier, at least in perception. Poke bowls, once poor folk food, now include thousands of possible options including quinoa, farro, kamut, teff, freekeh, bulgar, spelt, sorghum, amaranth, buckwheat and wheatberries. Rice bowls, too, can come in myriad incarnations — brown, white, black, brown or red; long, medium or short grain; arborio, bomba or cannoroli; basmati, jasmine or ponni; sticky, sushi or parboiled. And you can find them all in Des Moines today. 

Noodle bowls have nearly infinite options because pasta can be made with all grains and infused with almost any vegetable, root, flower or fruit. Pad Thai was an invention of the King of Thailand to wean his people off wheat noodles during the Great Depression. Now rice noodles are as common as wheat noodles worldwide and in Des Moines’ many Southeast Asian cafés.

Subway popularized lunch options with a mini cafeteria line from which customers customize their sandwiches. “Subway style” has spread to pizza chains like Blaze, burrito chains like Chipotle and Iowa’s Panchero’s, poke chains like The Poke Company, and even Ethiopian cafés like Gursha. 

The three taco lunch

Nearly 10% of Iowa restaurants are now owned and operated by Hispanic restaurateurs. The percentage is much larger in Des Moines. The new three martini lunch in Iowa is now a three taco lunch, especially on Tuesdays when bargains are in place at Abelardo’s, Taco John’s, Club 2000, La Familia, Faustino’s, Fernando’s, Malo, Beaver Tap, Mariscos El Pirata and more. Tasty Tacos is often the first place ex-Des Moines people have lunch upon returning home. 

Revival time

Lunch is the most challenging segment of the restaurant business post pandemic. Even as workers return to the office, the food service work force remains resistant to the midday schedule. There is still a lot to choose. 

Zombie Burger is the most popular restaurant in town for tourists. Olympic Flame is the oldest downtown restaurant. W Tao, Akebono and Miyabi 9 are making lunch raw or cooked, Miyabi 9 with a big screen robotic camera transmitting from downtown Tokyo. The Wasabi stores take that to the suburbs. Clyde’s Fine Diner has an oxymoronic geist. HoQ is the most farm to fork option. Lunch-only Local Eats fills its food court with seven options from teriyaki and Korean to burgers and Mediterranean. And the ubiquitous Panda Express is there, too, serving the chain’s famous orange chicken by the ton.  

Just off downtown, Tasty Tacos is a favorite lunch for legislators not being courted by lobbyists. Baratta’s, Latin King, Noah’s, Graziano Brothers and Tumea & Sons serve Italian lunches to enthusiastic regulars. 

Beyond 50309, choices are more plentiful. Eatery A has expanded into lunch service. Motley School Tavern serves stylish nostalgia. Old school Chinese style hangs on at Mandarin Noodle House, with its marvelous “traditional menu,” Wong’s Chopsticks, Shang Yuen, Shanghai, China Place, China Moon, China House, Tsing Tsao, Heavenly Asian, Mandarin Grill and Jade Garden. 

Tony Bourdain began his Civic Center show here by acknowledging “You’ve really got some great Vietnamese places Des Moines.” We do, and lunch is a bigger deal than dinner. A Dong is a civic icon, thrice revived from seizure, fire and COVID. The Egg Roll Ladies handrolls their specialties from scratch. Pho All Seasons, Rolling Wok and Pho 515 go beyond the average pho and stir fry menus to fully realize how magnificent the French occupation of Indo China was on a culinary basis. 

Le’s Chinese BBQ and Pho 515 elevate the possibility of roast duck for lunch. Eat Thai brings Los Angeles style Thai to West Des Moines. Fawn’s, Banana Leaf, Cool Basil, Lucky Lotus, Blu Thai, Aroy-Dee, JJ Jasmine, Zuzap, Kiin and the Thai Flavors stores all pack fans in for lunch and take-out. Nut Pob does, too, with more Laotian takes on Southeast Asian fare. MinGaLaBar is among the best Burmese restaurants anywhere on earth and is open for lunch with bargains. 

What time is lunch?

The lunch hour is as regionally disparate as its contents. The English invented the word nuncheon to define a light lunch taken in late afternoon. We call it Happy Hour food. 

Wiki says lunch is usually between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. in the U.S. and that is standard in Des Moines on weekdays. In the days of the old flat top diners here, 10:30 a.m. was the end of breakfast so that the grills could be cleaned before lunch began. CEOs and blue collar workers ate and left in half an hour then, because there were always people waiting for the next available swivel stool. Paula’s in Valley Junction preserves that lunch iconography. 

So, in this 12th incarnation of CITYVIEW readers’ vote for The Ultimate… (foods) of Des Moines, it’s your time to select, from all the myriad possibilities, your absolute favorite local lunch. ♦

 

Vote Here