Harbinger of invention

12/4/2024

Jim Duncan will further reckon the year in food in his Daily Umbrella column the last two weeks of the month. www.thedailyumbrella.com

December is the month of reckoning. We sum things up and calculate where we stand as a year ends and another looms. 2024 should go down as a transitional year. For the first time since COVID-19 shutdowns, new places were opening more often than old places were closing. More new restaurants opened this year in Ankeny than in all of central Iowa four years ago.

Some milestones this year: an exemplary Chennai style café (Amruth) opened in a bay that used to house a Mexican restaurant. The previous 10 years saw Mexican joints opening in venues that formerly housed other kinds of cuisine. Des Moines’ master comedian Willie Farrell even includes an Italian Southside riff on that subject in his routine. 

Lists dominated social media food coverage again this year. To our mind, they are the DEI of critical evaluation — a leveling of playing fields where all things are equal, and exceptionalism is disregarded. One recent press release announced that Chinese was the most popular cuisine in Iowa. That was based solely on Google searches and illustrates why Google is a false god. Inquiries on that search engine reflect a need for information about a subject, not its popularity. People search for Chinese restaurants because there are such a dwindling number of them in Iowa. Everyone in Iowa’s largest cities is aware of numerous Mexican and Italian cafes because there are so many of them.  

At CITYVIEW, we have a copyright on Best of… lists. We invite as many as 22,000 locals to vote their minds and hearts. Other such lists, “essential” or whatever, are now so common they have challenged the idea of exceptionalism among restaurants. 

We don’t believe that, and we don’t believe our scores of reader/voters do either. This column determined in early 2024 to only cover cafés of exemplary excellence. So, we finish this year at the one place in town we find exceptional enough to take out-of-towners, for the purpose of bragging about Des Moines’ café scene. 

Joe Tripp’s Harbinger is not like any other place. It fits no category. It features vegetables but is hardly vegetarian. It resembles East and Southeast Asian cuisines more than American or European ones. That is because Tripp has fully bought into the Thai-Viet philosophy, derived from Buddhism, that all flavors should be included and balanced in each dish. 

But you will never find classic Asian recipes here. It’s all about invention and the belief that the creative process is a Hegelian dialectic of ideas colliding and synthesizing new creations. To that end, Tripp invites his staff on learning experiences each year, to Japan, Thailand, Vietnam, etc. 

My favorite dish of 2024, anywhere, was a Harbinger invention. It’s called Taiwanese cabbage, but I’ve never had anything like it in Taiwan. The cabbage was cooked in crab oil, grilled, shredded and served with a toasted shrimp terrine and fermented chilies in a warm coconut milk vinaigrette. Nirvana plated.  

Tripp is an avid forager and pickler. His latest pork cheeks creation braises the meat in gold miso from the superb Cedar Falls company Iowa Miso. Those cheeks are served with pickled quince, porridge of pumpkin, and Brussels sprouts braised in bacon fat. His Dungeness crab, whose season just began, was served in tartlets with pickled asparagus, sweet Ponzu and a fermented sauce of yuzu (citrus) peels and chilies fermented with salt. All five flavors harmonizing, not fighting. 

A recent offering from Tripp’s tasting menu served milk marinated, fried sweetbreads with two kinds of Iowa miso, perilla (mint) leaves and kimchi in kimchi aioli. 

Harbinger is not expensive. My bill is sometimes half what it is in other top local cafés. Happy hour is daily and offers six amazing plates for $8 each, plus discounted drinks. ♦

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