Waterfront Seafood Restaurant — a classic

11/5/2025

Waterfront Seafood Restaurant is a trump card Des Moines can play against similarly sized cities in a game of “Whose food scene is better?” Its 247-seat mother store in West Des Moines has been busy for so long that metro diners take it for granted. Big mistake.

Independent seafood market-restaurants are a dying species in America. Giant distributors, a metastasizing species, have scared off most everyone from opening one the last 50 years. When Joe Tess Place closed in Omaha in 2023, Waterfront became the oldest such place between Chicago and Denver. 

Seafood is expensive compared to other proteins. The only way to compete for customers is to cut out the middlemen. But middlemen have the upper hand.  

“Watermen and fishermen are dying out for the same reasons as independent Iowa farmers. Those jobs used to be inherited within families. But the last few generations of children didn’t want that life,” explained Waterfront founder Shawn Hanke. 

Hanke began his business in 1983, running his pickup truck to Louisianna docks to buy shrimp directly off the boats, then bringing them back to sell at the Amoco gas station on 22nd Street in West Des Moines. 

“My dad Ted owned Dairy Queen franchises and operated the DQ by North High. He thought the west side needed a place like East Side Fish Market. I was 28 then, so I had the energy to run back and forth to the Gulf. But that wasn’t sustainable, so I rented storage space from Holmes Meat Market and the kosher market next to Mustard’s Last Stand and got into wholesaling. Then I met a regular at Mustard’s who was developing Clocktower Square. I opened here in 1984.”

Shawn distinguished from East Side Fish Market by including table dining. He opened with 14 seats and 10 employees. Today, the West Des Moines store alone has 247 seats in the dining room and bar, plus another 50 in a party room — and 72 full-time employees. Some of them have been there since day one. 

“We’re a family here,” he said.

Waterfront offers Des Moines fish that one finds nowhere else. French chef David Baruthio shows up for John Dory. Sablefish, an Asian delicacy now catching on in America, soft shell crabs, King salmon, pompano, blue fin tuna, flounder, Chesapeake rock fish and Alaskan halibut also star here. 

Waterfront also operates the oldest sushi bar in central Iowa. 

“When I was wholesaling, I supplied the first two sushi places in Iowa — Happy Sushi in Beaverdale and Sushi Bar in Ames. They were run by Japanese families. Before they moved back to Japan, I asked them to train sushi chefs for us.”

Shawn still buys most seafood directly from old connections who fish it. 

“I prefer to buy American, but so few people are still in the business that I have to buy some things overseas — mahi mahi from Costa Rica this week.”

Almost from the beginning, Waterfront has featured catfish nights on Monday, rotating specials on Wednesdays and half-priced oysters and shrimp cocktails on Saturday afternoons. A recent Wednesday special on sablefish was so popular that the restaurant ran out.

“I bought 70 pounds of filets. That should have been enough, but I let them sell some in the market. I used to plan a month ahead on Wednesday specials. Today it’s impossible to be sure I will get enough fresh seafood in time. I ordered two large tunas from a guy in the Gulf last week. Air freight shut down early on Saturday and sent them back. By Monday, they were sold to another buyer. Nothing is as dependable as it used to be.”

Except that Waterfront will always be stocked with fish you can’t buy anywhere else, bargains will always pop on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays, and employees will include familiar faces. ♦

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