Good news – our favorite Nepalese/Indian restaurant in Des Moines has moved a little closer to where we live — from the south side to Windsor Heights. My only concern is that one of my favorite things about Kathmandu (beyond the food) is the waiter’s shirt which said across the front: “More Parking in the Back.” (Now there’s plenty of parking in the front at the new location.)
Tag Archives: Des Moines
Good news in DSM: Kathmandu restaurant moves to Windsor Heights
Filed under Des Moines, DINING, Iowa
Welcome improvements on the Raccoon River Valley Trail – west of Des Moines
Two years ago, when I wrote a cover story about the Raccoon River Valley Trail for Rails to Trails magazine, the trail was looking good. Now it’s even better, as promised two years ago. Where the trail intersects with gravel roads, the section you ride over is now paved – rather than gravel, which is a huge improvement. There is also new landscaping here and there – some with new amenities such as picnic tables — which is also greatly appreciated.
It was hot and humid on the trail yesterday, which may explain why we had the 12-mile stretch from Redfield to Panora almost to ourselves. Lovely autumn landscape (despite the summary weather) with wide expanses of yellowing corn and still-green soy beans and old barns and bright blue silos in the distance. In the tiny town of Linden (a midway point), we had a lovely picnic at a table under an overhang in a small park. No one around other than the occasional piece of farm machinery rumbling by. In Panora, we stopped trailside at the Kick Stop for some ice cream and met some fellow riders from….the Czech Republic (they’ve lived in Ames, home of Iowa State U., for years). Great day and welcome reminder of what I love about living in Iowa.
Filed under bike trails, biking, Des Moines
Good meal at our new neighborhood joint – MST in DSM
We finally got around to trying out our new neighborhood joint, the restaurant MST ( Motley School Tavern) in Des Moines’ Beaverdale neighborhood. It was good! I had a delicious hamburger – rare as requested, with cheddar instead of American cheese as requested. The meat appeared to be freshly ground so there were a few non-edible bits but that was OK. Dirck, the Kansan among us, enjoyed his Chicken Fried Steak with mashed potatoes. The service was pleasant and professional and quick. The ambiance is low-key, hipster Beaverdale (if there is such a thing.) Seems to be a big draw for 30-something bald men with long thick beards. (We saw three of them.)
Filed under Des Moines, DINING
Kudos to Aposto – DSM
not only served up excellent Italian food on Saturday night but hefty portions of it — something not always done during Des Moines’ Restaurant Week. Too often, we’ve become hungry soon after a restaurant week meal — with tiny portions of this and that for the $28 fixed price menu. (Didn’t it used to be $25? Now there are also optional add-ons to the menu, for an additional price.)
At Aposto — which we’ve somehow never been to until now, although it’s been around for years — they chose differently. The food was very good — gazpacho or Cesar Salad for the first course; glazed chunks of pork with brocollini or cavatelli with sausage for the main; panna cotta with balsamic and strawberries or a wicked remake of a Reese’s peanut butter cup for dessert. So was the service, the price and yes, the portions. We were not remotely hungry, hours later.
Aposto is in a shabby chic old house in the historic Sherman Hill neighborhood, with a graceful wraparound porch (where we ate outside with friends in perfect eating out weather — cool, no bugs). It’s the former home of a restaurant we loved decades ago — Chat Noir — and still retains some of its funkiness.
Filed under Des Moines, DINING, Uncategorized
Elizabeth Warren, Slipknot,Pork Belly on a stick at 2019 Iowa State Fair – Des Moines
I wouldn’t normally go to the Iowa State Fair on a Saturday — too busy. But I wanted to catch Elizabeth Warren’s brief stint on the Des Moines Register’s famous political soapbox, so we went. It was hot, although not as hot as it could have been, and very very crowded but we did get to see Liz, who performed well and apparently had the largest crowd of all the 2019 Democratic political candidates, to date. (I couldn’t tell – -we were in the thick of the crowd, standing next to a young documentary filmmaker from L.A. who was shooting footage for a film about the Iowa State Fair’s role in presidential politics, or some such.)
We also happened to hear former Colorado Governor Hickenlooper, who seems like a good guy — and although we skipped the Cory Booker soapbox appearance, we passed him and a large entourage, reportedly in search of vegen-worthy fair food. Speaking of non-vegan-worthy food, I fell hard for the maple syrup cured-pork belly on a stick sold at the Iowa Pork Producers tent.
While Dirck had a proper pork chop, I went full stick — with what looked like a thick piece of well-cooked bacon, with a brown chewy gooey sweet glaze, twisted around a stick. Delicious. We double dipped in the ice cream department — getting a cone from the Iowa Dairy Producers early on and as we were leaving, a Bauder’s peppermint-hot fudge bar that we split.
The fair always makes for exceptional people watching but even more so this year because of the political campaign workers/reporters (telltale signs: a Princeton T-shirt, the DC regulation gear – blue button down shirt and khaki combo, etc), the unnerving folks wearing NRA T-shirts, camouflage gear and/or Trump 2020 shirts (Dirck had to restrain me from shooting them dirty looks. Probably best to ignore them.) Also, the hard metal band Slipknot (internationally-known, Iowa-born) was playing its first ever state fair concert to a sell-out crowd so there were some 20,000 maggots (slipknot speak for “fans”) — many wearing menacing black Slipknot t-shirts or other weirdo Slipknot gear (bright orange jumpsuits, creepy face masks like the band members). Many waited in a long line outside a trailer dubbed the “Slipknot Museum” that was parked in the middle of the Grand Concourse (fair speak for the fair’s main drag). It all added a little je ne sais quoi to the fair…
Filed under Agritourism, Des Moines, Iowa City
New Waterworks Park amphitheater for outdoor concerts – Des Moines
I
I have such fond memories of warm summer nights on the lawn of Meadowbrook Hall in suburban Detroit, listening to live music performed by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Flash forward to Des Moines , which has a new outdoor stage in Waterworks Park for concerts by, among others, the Des Moines Symphony. Last night’s weather was not ideal – light intermittent rain – but what a treat to sit on a lawn chair on the green grass, watching clouds drift by in the sky, eating ice cream served from The Outer Scoop’s truck and listening to John Williams’ movie scores played by the Des Moines symphony. Oh, and did I mention that the concert was free? there were two free symphony concerts this year. Next up, performances by Ben Folds and Maren Morris …neither free.
Filed under Des Moines, Detroit, Iowa, music
South American food tour in Des Moines
Anyone who eats out in Des Moines – or aspires to – has noticed a sudden profusion of South American restaurants in town – Peruvian (an elegant little place called Panka on Ingersoll Ave), Argentinian, Brazilian and Ecuadoran. Apparently the mass is critical enough to warrant a South American food tour (on July 27 and Oct. 5) — Check out this story in the DSM Register. https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/entertainment/dining/2019/06/18/wow-des-moines-tours-launches-south-american-cuisine-peru-colombis-argentina-brazil-near-me/1485577001/
(It mentions Columbian food too – don’t know what restaurant serves that!)
Filed under Des Moines
Queer Abstraction show opens at the Des Moines Art Center
Word has it over 900 people showed up last Saturday night (June 1) for the Des Moines Center’s first show to feature the artwork of LGBT&Q artists…The crowd included many members of the “queer” community, some drag queens, no shortage of presumably straight folks and me. It was a great celebration – with food, drink, music – and, of course, work by 15 artists that is well worth a visit to see! Oh and it also won a major prize from Sotheby’s: https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/sothebys-prize-winning-queer-abstraction-exhibition-breaks-new-ground-in-iowa
Filed under Des Moines, Iowa, museum exhibit, Uncategorized
Dodging tornadoes in Iowa/cheese 101 at Eataly in Chicagol
We somehow managed to drive from Des Moines to Chicago last night without directly encountering any of the storms that were popping up all around us. Outside Iowa City on I-80, we saw scary looking white clouds (which may or may not have produced the tornado we learned touched down about 25 minutes before we passed through) and in Illinois, lightning lit up the dark night just south of us and north of us off and on. Needless to say, we were very happy when we got to Chicago around midnight.
Today, the weather was much more pleasant than anticipated in Chicago, sunny and warm instead of rainy. We spent two hours at the scoula on the second floor of eataly, taking a very fun cheese and wine tasting class that emma and rocket got me for my birthday. Great gift idea and we sampled 6 cheeses, and 3 “natural” wines and learned everything we ever wanted to know about to cheese from the cheesemonger.
Cheeses we tried and enjoyed (all of those served): casa Madaio, Canestrato, Campania; Jasper hill, Bayley Haven Blue, Vermont; Agriform,, Parmigiano; Arrigoni, quartirolo Lombardo; ca de’ambros, Nocetto di capra (goat cheese) Guffanti, sola…wine: micro Marriott I, Bianco dell’emilia
Dinner was very good at a place with the unappetizing name:Income Tax in Edgewater. Mediterranean fare.
Filed under Chicago, Iowa, Iowa City, Uncategorized
A perfect 60th birthday meal at Harbinger — Des Moines
I get why the chef at the small Des Moines restaurant Harbinger is a semifinalist for a James Beard award (Best Chef, Midwest). We just had a superb meal there to mark my 60th birthday. We’d been once before – during restaurant week when we ate small bites of small plates for a small price. This time, we got bigger bites of small plates for a not-as-small-but-still-reasonable price — and the food made even more of an impression, a good one. Almost all the “plates” had an Asian twist — Vietnamese, Thai or Japanese — and almost every one was something we’d never eaten before.
We had two appetizers — the first was “tapioca and pecorino fritters” –2-inch crispy-on-the-outside-moist-on-the-inside logs of yes, tapioca and tangy cheese in a spicy tomato sauce. Delicious. So were the Prince Edward Island mussels in a light but spicy Thai coconut milk sauce.
The small plates we tried (and enjoyed) were:
- A bowl with moist coconut rice, large pieces of Berkshire pork shank (“braised in Chinese aromatics” and roasted chili vinegar).
- Fresh spinach with sweet cipolla onions and strawberries somehow dried akin to raisins.
- Two small steamed buns — one with spicy sriracha chicken, the other with a grilled pork belly in a sweet Hoisin sauce.
Dessert, which was on the house because it was my birthday, was a “YUZU KOSHO tartlet”* which tasted sort of like a deconstructed lemon meringue pie but looked nothing like one. There was a big pale yellow blob of lemon curd with a little chili kick that looked like a large creamy egg yolk and then a small tail of cooked blue berries, little white blobs of creamy meringue and chips of what we were told was part of a fortune cookie. It was clever and superb!
Note to self: return for the happy hour and the weekend brunch!
* This from Wikipedia: Yuzu is a Japanese citrus fruit that looks like a lemon. Yuzukoshō is Japanese seasoning, a paste made from chili peppers, yuzu peel and salt, which is then fermented. It is usually used as a condiment for nabemono dishes, miso soup, and sashimi.
Filed under Des Moines, Iowa
TakeBetsywithyou 