Lucca finds its ‘sweet spot’

7/31/2024

Lucca just turned 20 years old. It has nurtured some of the city’s very best chefs and restaurateurs. Owner Steve Logsdon brought David Baruthio (Baru66 and four other places) here from France when he opened. Derek Eidson (Django and Guesthouse Supper Club) followed him. Logsdon is a James Beard Best Chef Midwest semifinalist himself. His brother, Joe, who makes Lucca’s bread, is a James Beard National Best Pastry Chef semifinalist. Steve began his career in a similar incubator for talent. He worked the kitchen with George Formaro and Chuck Fuller at Mike Lavalle’s City Grille. 

Steve and Joe, both schooled in French baking, sold bread and other treats from a push cart above the Locust Food Court beginning in 1994. They then opened Basil Prosperi, a bakery and prix fixe dinner spot in the converted Italian Import Store on East Fifth. That was a renovation of the late Kirk Blunck, the visionary architect who saved and repurposed most of East Village’s existing historic buildings before being murdered in one. 

Blunck then interested Steve in another building around the corner. It had originally been the Swedish Bath House in 1880, then a “Live Nude Dancing” club, and most recently Locust Street Billiards. Lucca’s light fixtures are still spaced a pool table apart from one another. The place had been abandoned for 25 years. Fire damage was its most visible feature. 

“I bought it for $45,000 and spent another $700,000 to open,” Steve recalls. “Basically, I bought two brick walls and a basement, which was amazingly in good shape.”

It’s a spectacular building now, with a grand piano being the only art in a modernist design between those old brick walls. 

“People ask me why I don’t have art on the walls. Really, they do.” 

Lucca’s kitchen is in the basement, its main dining room on floor one, and a party or overflow room upstairs. Basil Prosperi was named after Logsdon’s grandfather, a Tuscan American murdered in Des Moines for dating a Calabrese-American. Lucca is named for Prosperi’s hometown. After testing haute cuisine and scratch-made everything, Steve discovered his most important mission is finding “the sweet spot for customers.” That has as much to do with affordable price points as haute cuisine. 

Lucca is focused simply on that.

“We don’t do craft cocktails.” 

Labor is focused on efficiency, as just four people man the kitchen. For lunch, salads with bread, sandwiches with soup or salad, and pasta with bread are all $13 to $15, even with scallop and salmon options. Dinners are all $57 for four courses. That includes New York strip and sea bass among six third course options, risotto and eggplant among nine seconds, and a divine artichoke soup among six firsts. Lucca’s crispy salmon skins are on a level with those at top Japanese cafés. I am a huge fan of Lucca’s clam and anchovy sauces for pasta. Most everything is served with freshly grated cheeses, even clam sauce.

Lucca has definitely found its sweet spot. It is packed for lunch in an era when other top downtown restaurants are struggling just to open doors for lunch service. As if to illustrate its reputation for value with quality, on my last lunch visit, Greg Abel was dining there. He’s the handpicked successor to Warren Buffet at Berkshire Hathway, the epitome of “value with quality” hunters. 

Lucca’s charms also fly above politics. One night a Terry Branstad party followed a previous night’s Tom Vilsack party. That’s not typical elsewhere in a town where donkeys and elephants herd themselves to partisan stomping grounds. 

Lucca has staff that has been with them all 20 years. Logsdon’s front of the house co-part, Marcella Alvarado, is as well-known as he is. Such loyalty is rare. 

“I pay well,” he tries to explain. It’s much more than that. Logsdon has traveled out of town more than once to help his employees’ families fight bureaucracies. n

Jim Duncan is a food writer who has been covering the central Iowa scene for more than five decades.