Iowa Restaurants

There's a dish to satisfy every taste at Spaghetti Works, where diners can customize meals to their hearts’ and mouths’ content. Plates of fettuccini or whole-wheat mostaccioli can be enjoyed with sweet italian sausage, beer-cheese sauce, and a wide variety of other toppings. Meanwhile, the restaurant's cooks also prepare classic Italian dishes, such as homemade lasagna and shrimp scampi, and craft gluten-free pizzas and pasta bowls. Diners can cap meals with beer, wine, a cocktail, or more than 20 flavors of Italian sodas.

Known as a family-friendly establishment, Spaghetti Works delights both children and adults with its quirky decor. All three locations feature red-checkered tablecloths and vintage model T trucks, the backs of which hold salad bars with all the fixings. And at all three locations, guests can admire the setting sun from an outdoor patio—a sight almost as beautiful as that of a kitten hatching from its shell.

The kitchen bustled behind teenage Enosh Kelley as he stood over the sink, dutifully scrubbing pots and pans while dreaming of becoming a chef. From those humble origins, recounted in his Metromix profile, Enosh has grown into an internationally renowned culinary artist lauded by reporters from the Wall Street Journal and nominated as best Midwest chef by the James Beard Foundation. Pulling from his training at the Culinary Institute of America, Enosh folds local ingredients into a French-inspired menu, favoring classics such as hand-cut pomme frites, duck orange, and gâteau marjolaine.

Nestled in the heart of the historic Ingersoll Avenue district, Enosh's restaurant—Bistro Montage—is a fitting canvas for his fine French creations. Plates pair with glasses from a distilled wine list on white-clothed tables decorated with freshly cut flowers. Nearby, framed artwork speckles the brick-red walls, and long, flowing curtains dangle from the windows to keep the lighting dim and intimate while providing a convenient hiding place for guests on disappointing blind dates.

Throughout the year, shipments of live crawfish arrive at Fat Tuesday's doorstep. Newspapers spread across tables, customers pull up their sleeves, and baskets of boiled crawfish and corn arrive from the kitchen before the crack of snapping shells resounds through the restaurant.

In between their regular crawfish boils, the kitchen crew members whip up what they refer to as a "small but mighty" daily menu of Cajun specialties. Cooks layer poboys with fried alligator, oysters, and catfish, and pots of seafood gumbo and crawfish étouffée simmer on stovetops. Plates pair with Cajun craft beers beneath glimmering purple, yellow, and green streamers throughout the New Orleans–themed dining room. Testing their patrons’ stomach capacities, the chefs challenge them to the occasional poboy-eating contest. The contestants must polish off a 2-foot-long poboy within 40 minutes while simultaneously whistling the sous chef's favorite blues song.

It's usually Mullets' mascot that first catches guests' eyes, flashing its gill-to-gill grin from its post-top perch. Then there's the big neon sign, which further befits the establishment's roadhouse atmosphere. Situated at the confluence of the Raccoon and Des Moines Rivers, Mullets draws in patrons with pub staples such as burgers, sandwiches, and pizzas as well as plentiful seafood options that include catfish, bluegill, crawfish, and frog legs. Servers can bring these dishes out to the wood-paneled dining room or up the stairs to the two-level outdoor patio, where banners for the Chicago Cubs and Boulevard Brewing Company ripple in the wind like the tongue of a skydiving dog. The staff encourages patrons to make their own marks on the pub’s playful atmosphere by posting photos of their mullets—whether haircuts or state-fair-winning fish—to the Mulletin board.

Barley’s builds culinary character by guiding its delicious menu of traditional burger and steak fare through a series of exhausting yet rewarding victual rituals. Start with homemade flour chips ($5.95) with cheddar cheese and salsa as a way of making peace with growling stomach Gorgons. Equip both fists with a smokehouse burger (with cheddar, barbecue sauce, and bacon, $7.95) and a guacamole burger ($8.45), or contemplate the trinity of a triple club ($7.95) served with ham, turkey, bacon, and more between two slabs of marble rye. There are also a number of options for the vegetarian crowd, including the garden burger ($7.95) and garden Philly ($7.75), each stocked with 100% vegan patties. In between bites of burgers, steaks, and salads, sip on some fresh-squeezed ales and lagers from the bottle or tap, with varieties spanning the intoxicating rainbow from micro and macro brews.

One glance at the Bonsoirée menu and it becomes clear that the chic, minimalist décor is pretty much the only thing minimalist about the place. Each dish in chef/owner Shin Thompson and chef de cuisine Luke Creagan’s "exquisitely crafted" four- ($58), seven- ($85), and 13-course ($150) flavor symphonies draws inspiration from a range of cultures and blends traditional Japanese presentation with classic French techniques. A new menu is introduced monthly, but a recent four-course line-up kicks off a night of gourmandizing with a salad of crispy Suzuki, grilled-haricot vert, and pickled ramp with lotus root drizzled in genmaicha vinaigrette and rhubarb sorbet. A fava-bean and spring-pea soup spiced with curried artichoke and green garlic then drum-rolls the curtain-raise on the meal’s centerpiece: a roast of grass-fed spring lamb from Mint Creek Farms, served with potato-and-chickpea confit, shochu Japanese–barbecue sauce, fried potato skins, smoked shimeiji mushrooms, and death mustard, a mysterious savory substance. A dessert of gingerbread ice-cream sandwich sided with ginger-cinnamon-bark ice cream and sprinkled with pecans helps quivering taste buds waft gently back down to earth. If you’re afraid that talking will destroy the food’s delicate interplay of complex flavors, you and your dining companions can entertain yourselves by watching Chef Thompson work his magic and occasionally subdue a cutlery-wielding octopus in the open kitchen window. Also, make use of Bonsoirée's new wine program: call Provenance Food and Wine, Cellar Rat, or Randolph Wine Cellars ahead of time, and get a bottle of wine delivered to Bonsoirée free of charge in advance of your reservation at no extra cost.