McBee’s Meat Company in Lamoni is a star of Iowa’s comprehensive meat locker scene.
Hotel Grinnell repurposes a 1921 Junior High School with resort flair.
ROAD TRIPS FOR FOODIES
Iowa has much to entice travelers who follow their noses and taste buds.
By Jim Duncan
Food tourism is a rather new big thing. To justify reports that Florida had paid expenses for Michelin to create a restaurant guide to the state, Florida’s tourism department announced that Tampa brought in $1.09 billion in food spending last year, Orlando $7.33 billion, and Miami $4.88 billion, and that tourism accounted for much of that.
Iowa has a lot of tourist attractions but does little to promote them. That is left to towns like Dubuque, counties like Van Buren and private entities like the Newton Speedway and the Field of Dreams. Yet, Iowa has much to entice travelers who follow their noses and taste buds.
For Iowans, in-state, food-driven road trips are best taken in autumn. September’s harvest is the year’s best as seen in extraordinary farmers markets of Iowa City, Decorah, Fairfield and Lamoni. The state’s rich black soil grows the world’s best tomatoes, and they are in peak season in September in the company of late summer’s melons and autumn’s early treats — squash, apples and fall spinach, so different from summer’s version it’s like another food.
Orchards are in “you-pick ’em” glory, particularly in the Loess Hills, Winneshiek, Greene and Jefferson counties. Homecoming parades and games with their marching bands, football teams and tailgating opportunities are rife in towns like Harlan, Orange City and Grinnell, as well as on university campuses. Indian summer and campfire huddles can share the same weekend.
These are some of our favorite Iowa road trips taste-tested over the seven decades since we got our driver’s license and began seeking things to eat that neither Mom nor Grandma made at home.
An hour or so drive
Lamoni is a food lover’s roadside attraction. An hour down U.S. 69 or I-80, it offers an Amish Farmers Auction where food vendors buy truckloads of produce to resell at other farmers markets. Smaller lots are usually sold by vendors at the same time. Those happen on Wednesdays and Fridays in growing months.
On Thursdays and some Saturdays, the Sales Barn auctions livestock, up to 500 a day, in a timeless barn where little has changed in a century. Humans still bid against one another, with auctioneers officiating to control the fates of other animals. The Sales Barn Café does a fabulous job on old-fashioned favorites like buttermilk-marinated breaded pork tenderloins, and thin, freshly cut and battered onion rings; plus pies and pastries.
McBee Meat Company has one of the best shopping cases of all Iowa’s wonderful meat lockers. Lamb entrails, beef hearts and back ribs, deer jerky, four kinds of bacon and just about every part of any animal raised or killed for meat are for sale. Bring a cooler.
The Amish Country Store & Maid Rite offers great prices on spices and carries hard-to-find ones like whole nutmegs. They also have homemade preserves, jellies, jams and fruit butters always sweetened with real sugar not HFCS or any chemical you can’t pronounce.
Beyond food, Graceland University sports teams play in the Closson Center, a giant architectural covered wagon. Its roof is suspended by three huge arches twixt a network of steel cables and wire mesh covered by rubber and nine coats of polyurethane foam. Nothing else like it is left in America.
In the area, the Dinky Diner in nearby Decatur City draws people from near and far for their chicken fried steaks, hot beef sandwiches, homemade pies and pastries. It is one of a dwindling number of Valentine diners, famous and far flung in the 1940s and 1950s. Plus, legal enticements suddenly banned in Iowa are less than 10 miles south in Eagleville, Missouri.
Or…
Grinnell has a renowned college with an extraordinary endowment and impressive art museum. That’s well known. The town also now boasts of a unique, charming hotel, wine houses, coffee shops and cafés that are more urban than small town. Homecoming and its parade are big deals here. Prairie Canary is one of Iowa’s top cafés.
Hotel Grinnell is a repurposed 1921 junior high school smack dab on the town square. It’s a true boutique hotel — uniquely combining spa trappings, old school ambiance and a recess mindset with a nod to the college town it serves. Its bar/restaurant is named The Periodic Table.
Two hours or so
Fairfield is a trip, in the 1960s sense of the slang. Maharishi International University and its penchant for attracting worldly transcendental meditators have created an astonishing business community including the world’s leading marble cutter and Iowa’s best organic dairy — Radiance. Bring a cooler.
You can find Ayurvedic restaurants and even an Ayurvedic spa, healers of all sorts and almost any type of cuisine you can’t find anywhere else in Iowa.
Iowa’s ridiculously good cider house scene is represented by Fishback & Stephenson. They also provide a kitchen that mainly turns out burgers. Oh, what burgers. They are sourced from whole cows, including prime ribs and filets that are pasture-raised nearby from birth to finishing by the Adrian family of Jefferson County. The cattle are finished on a diet of apple mash from the cider house.
I have never tasted a better burger. They are six-and-a-half-ounce patties in various styles. Sides are unique, too. Where else can you call your kale? Dazzling Blue and Westlander kales from the Maharishi University Organic Regenerative Gardens are used. The Caesar kale salad includes anchovy filets, freshly shaved Parmesan, and croutons roasted in bacon fat.
“Cowboy caviar” combines black eyed peas and sweet corn with three peppers. Hard cider and clam chowder are served as sides with burgers.
Or…
Mason City has the largest Greek American population in Iowa, and its Northwestern Steak House, dating to 1920, is the best Greek restaurant in the state, as well as one of the best steakhouses. The town has fabulous city parks, a hotel designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and excellent Victorian homes, including one that houses the MacNider Art Museum.
Van Buren County boasts “Iowa’s only county without a stoplight.” The Villages of Van Buren are nestled in a river valley and a time warp. When the Mormons were run out of Nauvoo, many of them stopped along the Mormon Trail to earn enough to move on. The historic buildings in Bentonsport, Bonaparte and Keosauqua were built by such superb craftsmen when those towns were rich on river commerce. Silt and the railroads ended that prosperity, and things blessedly froze in time.
The Manning Hotel opened in 1899 in Keosauqua with Steamboat Gothic architecture and river views. The Mason House in Bentonsport was a Civil War hospital and does not discourage rumors that Abe Lincoln slept there, near his beloved Anne Rutledge’s home and grave.
The Dutchman’s Store in Cantrill and the Milton Creamery offer excellent Amish products. The county’s charms drew 20th-century artists including the great painter Wendell Mohr and the first family of contemporary folk music, Greg Brown and Iris Diment.
Three hours or so
On one trip to Decorah, a local chauvinist told me the town was now the “preferred retirement center for liberal Lutheran clergy.” In hopes of running into oxymorons, I extended my stay and discovered things that attract them.
Decorah occupies a part of Iowa unlike the rest. It’s surrounded by mountains, river valleys and land that has never been suitable for planting row crops. As a result, its farmers markets are unique with the bounty of organic foods that grow in rocky fields and at variable elevations. It even has a geological nickname — The Driftless.
If that isn’t why Seed Savers Exchange (SSE) settled here, it explains why it thrived here. SSE is one of the world’s biggest banks for rare seeds, and the only private one. It specializes in heirloom seeds carried over oceans by immigrants to America. It is a big reason why Iowa grows the country’s best tomatoes. Listen to the mighty music of their names — Sheboygan and Brandywine, Earliana and Opalka, Kanner Hoell and Wapsipinicon, Green Zebra and Hungarian Heart. This year’s Grand Tomato Tasting is Sept. 7.
The 890-acre SSE Heritage Farm headquarters is called the “most diverse farm in the world” by ethnobotanist Gary Paul Nabhan. More than 25,000 rare fruit, vegetable and plant varieties are regenerated, refrigerated and preserved. It has its own underground seed vault held at below-freezing temperatures, a herd of White Park Cattle, and 900 apple tree varieties.
The Historic Orchard, the Amy Goldman Heritage Orchard, heritage poultry breeds, roaming Ancient White Park cattle, a century barn, miles of hiking trails and a trout stream fill out its charms. The annual Orchard Tour and Apple Tasting will be Oct. 5.
Decorah also sports one of Iowa’s great hotels, the 1905 Hotel Winneshiek with terrazzo floors, marble walls, cherry woodwork, mahogany doors and a grand staircase complementing modern amenities. Oh, it also has its own opera house.
The great fisherman and sports writer Bryce Miller raves about the local fishing waters. Circle the 11-mile Trout Run Trail. Dunning Springs Waterfall is a primary location for wedding photos.
The Vesterheim Norwegian-American Museum is a great history lesson. Holiday season brings out julebukkers, a cross between Halloween pranksters and Christmas carolers. Rubaiyat restaurant serves such Middle Eastern exotics as camel burgers and boasts Iowa’s best collection of Levantine wines.
Or…
The most popular Iowa destinations of the fall are mostly on the Mississippi River. Beyond the changing leaves, one of Iowa’s best restaurants awaits in Clinton. Rastrelli’s was founded by Tuscan immigrants Pete and Ida Rastrelli in 1939 as a candy shop. They later became one of Iowa’s very first pizza makers. Today, steaks, seafood and Italian dishes are also served. Their quite famous bread was created in 1957.
Le Claire’s historic charms are many. Buffalo Bill Cody was a native. History Channel’s American Pickers originated in Le Claire’s antique shops. Mississippi River Distilling Company offers daily tours and a cocktail lounge. Their spirts are concocted with grains and herbs grown within 50 miles. MRDC’s River Rose is my favorite gin anywhere with botanicals from orange, grapefruit, lemon, lavender, rose petals and locally grown cucumbers.
Fullmer’s Fish Market is Iowa’s last old fashioned fish shack business. They offer Mississippi River yield including sturgeon, buffalo fish and several kinds of carp and catfish. I know people in Chicago who make the trip just to buy their smoked sturgeon.
Food tourism is a rather new big thing. To justify reports that Florida had paid expenses for Michelin to create a restaurant guide to the state, Florida’s tourism department announced that Tampa brought in $1.09 billion in food spending last year, Orlando $7.33 billion, and Miami $4.88 billion, and that tourism accounted for much of that.
Iowa has a lot of tourist attractions but does little to promote them. That is left to towns like Dubuque, counties like Van Buren and private entities like the Newton Speedway and the Field of Dreams. Yet, Iowa has much to entice travelers who follow their noses and taste buds.
For Iowans, in-state, food-driven road trips are best taken in autumn. September’s harvest is the year’s best as seen in extraordinary farmers markets of Iowa City, Decorah, Fairfield and Lamoni. The state’s rich black soil grows the world’s best tomatoes, and they are in peak season in September in the company of late summer’s melons and autumn’s early treats — squash, apples and fall spinach, so different from summer’s version it’s like another food.
Orchards are in “you-pick ’em” glory, particularly in the Loess Hills, Winneshiek, Greene and Jefferson counties. Homecoming parades and games with their marching bands, football teams and tailgating opportunities are rife in towns like Harlan, Orange City and Grinnell, as well as on university campuses. Indian summer and campfire huddles can share the same weekend.
These are some of our favorite Iowa road trips taste-tested over the seven decades since we got our driver’s license and began seeking things to eat that neither Mom nor Grandma made at home.
An hour or so drive
Lamoni is a food lover’s roadside attraction. An hour down U.S. 69 or I-80, it offers an Amish Farmers Auction where food vendors buy truckloads of produce to resell at other farmers markets. Smaller lots are usually sold by vendors at the same time. Those happen on Wednesdays and Fridays in growing months.
On Thursdays and some Saturdays, the Sales Barn auctions livestock, up to 500 a day, in a timeless barn where little has changed in a century. Humans still bid against one another, with auctioneers officiating to control the fates of other animals. The Sales Barn Café does a fabulous job on old-fashioned favorites like buttermilk-marinated breaded pork tenderloins, and thin, freshly cut and battered onion rings; plus pies and pastries.
McBee Meat Company has one of the best shopping cases of all Iowa’s wonderful meat lockers. Lamb entrails, beef hearts and back ribs, deer jerky, four kinds of bacon and just about every part of any animal raised or killed for meat are for sale. Bring a cooler.
The Amish Country Store & Maid Rite offers great prices on spices and carries hard-to-find ones like whole nutmegs. They also have homemade preserves, jellies, jams and fruit butters always sweetened with real sugar not HFCS or any chemical you can’t pronounce.
Beyond food, Graceland University sports teams play in the Closson Center, a giant architectural covered wagon. Its roof is suspended by three huge arches twixt a network of steel cables and wire mesh covered by rubber and nine coats of polyurethane foam. Nothing else like it is left in America.
In the area, the Dinky Diner in nearby Decatur City draws people from near and far for their chicken fried steaks, hot beef sandwiches, homemade pies and pastries. It is one of a dwindling number of Valentine diners, famous and far flung in the 1940s and 1950s. Plus, legal enticements suddenly banned in Iowa are less than 10 miles south in Eagleville, Missouri.
Or…
Grinnell has a renowned college with an extraordinary endowment and impressive art museum. That’s well known. The town also now boasts of a unique, charming hotel, wine houses, coffee shops and cafés that are more urban than small town. Homecoming and its parade are big deals here. Prairie Canary is one of Iowa’s top cafés.
Hotel Grinnell is a repurposed 1921 junior high school smack dab on the town square. It’s a true boutique hotel — uniquely combining spa trappings, old school ambiance and a recess mindset with a nod to the college town it serves. Its bar/restaurant is named The Periodic Table.
Two hours or so
Fairfield is a trip, in the 1960s sense of the slang. Maharishi International University and its penchant for attracting worldly transcendental meditators have created an astonishing business community including the world’s leading marble cutter and Iowa’s best organic dairy — Radiance. Bring a cooler.
You can find Ayurvedic restaurants and even an Ayurvedic spa, healers of all sorts and almost any type of cuisine you can’t find anywhere else in Iowa.
Iowa’s ridiculously good cider house scene is represented by Fishback & Stephenson. They also provide a kitchen that mainly turns out burgers. Oh, what burgers. They are sourced from whole cows, including prime ribs and filets that are pasture-raised nearby from birth to finishing by the Adrian family of Jefferson County. The cattle are finished on a diet of apple mash from the cider house.
I have never tasted a better burger. They are six-and-a-half-ounce patties in various styles. Sides are unique, too. Where else can you call your kale? Dazzling Blue and Westlander kales from the Maharishi University Organic Regenerative Gardens are used. The Caesar kale salad includes anchovy filets, freshly shaved Parmesan, and croutons roasted in bacon fat.
“Cowboy caviar” combines black eyed peas and sweet corn with three peppers. Hard cider and clam chowder are served as sides with burgers.
Or…
Mason City has the largest Greek American population in Iowa, and its Northwestern Steak House, dating to 1920, is the best Greek restaurant in the state, as well as one of the best steakhouses. The town has fabulous city parks, a hotel designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and excellent Victorian homes, including one that houses the MacNider Art Museum.
Van Buren County boasts “Iowa’s only county without a stoplight.” The Villages of Van Buren are nestled in a river valley and a time warp. When the Mormons were run out of Nauvoo, many of them stopped along the Mormon Trail to earn enough to move on. The historic buildings in Bentonsport, Bonaparte and Keosauqua were built by such superb craftsmen when those towns were rich on river commerce. Silt and the railroads ended that prosperity, and things blessedly froze in time.
The Manning Hotel opened in 1899 in Keosauqua with Steamboat Gothic architecture and river views. The Mason House in Bentonsport was a Civil War hospital and does not discourage rumors that Abe Lincoln slept there, near his beloved Anne Rutledge’s home and grave.
The Dutchman’s Store in Cantrill and the Milton Creamery offer excellent Amish products. The county’s charms drew 20th-century artists including the great painter Wendell Mohr and the first family of contemporary folk music, Greg Brown and Iris Diment.
Three hours or so
On one trip to Decorah, a local chauvinist told me the town was now the “preferred retirement center for liberal Lutheran clergy.” In hopes of running into oxymorons, I extended my stay and discovered things that attract them.
Decorah occupies a part of Iowa unlike the rest. It’s surrounded by mountains, river valleys and land that has never been suitable for planting row crops. As a result, its farmers markets are unique with the bounty of organic foods that grow in rocky fields and at variable elevations. It even has a geological nickname — The Driftless.
If that isn’t why Seed Savers Exchange (SSE) settled here, it explains why it thrived here. SSE is one of the world’s biggest banks for rare seeds, and the only private one. It specializes in heirloom seeds carried over oceans by immigrants to America. It is a big reason why Iowa grows the country’s best tomatoes. Listen to the mighty music of their names — Sheboygan and Brandywine, Earliana and Opalka, Kanner Hoell and Wapsipinicon, Green Zebra and Hungarian Heart. This year’s Grand Tomato Tasting is Sept. 7.
The 890-acre SSE Heritage Farm headquarters is called the “most diverse farm in the world” by ethnobotanist Gary Paul Nabhan. More than 25,000 rare fruit, vegetable and plant varieties are regenerated, refrigerated and preserved. It has its own underground seed vault held at below-freezing temperatures, a herd of White Park Cattle, and 900 apple tree varieties.
The Historic Orchard, the Amy Goldman Heritage Orchard, heritage poultry breeds, roaming Ancient White Park cattle, a century barn, miles of hiking trails and a trout stream fill out its charms. The annual Orchard Tour and Apple Tasting will be Oct. 5.
Decorah also sports one of Iowa’s great hotels, the 1905 Hotel Winneshiek with terrazzo floors, marble walls, cherry woodwork, mahogany doors and a grand staircase complementing modern amenities. Oh, it also has its own opera house.
The great fisherman and sports writer Bryce Miller raves about the local fishing waters. Circle the 11-mile Trout Run Trail. Dunning Springs Waterfall is a primary location for wedding photos.
The Vesterheim Norwegian-American Museum is a great history lesson. Holiday season brings out julebukkers, a cross between Halloween pranksters and Christmas carolers. Rubaiyat restaurant serves such Middle Eastern exotics as camel burgers and boasts Iowa’s best collection of Levantine wines.
Or…
The most popular Iowa destinations of the fall are mostly on the Mississippi River. Beyond the changing leaves, one of Iowa’s best restaurants awaits in Clinton. Rastrelli’s was founded by Tuscan immigrants Pete and Ida Rastrelli in 1939 as a candy shop. They later became one of Iowa’s very first pizza makers. Today, steaks, seafood and Italian dishes are also served. Their quite famous bread was created in 1957.
Le Claire’s historic charms are many. Buffalo Bill Cody was a native. History Channel’s American Pickers originated in Le Claire’s antique shops. Mississippi River Distilling Company offers daily tours and a cocktail lounge. Their spirts are concocted with grains and herbs grown within 50 miles. MRDC’s River Rose is my favorite gin anywhere with botanicals from orange, grapefruit, lemon, lavender, rose petals and locally grown cucumbers.
Fullmer’s Fish Market is Iowa’s last old fashioned fish shack business. They offer Mississippi River yield including sturgeon, buffalo fish and several kinds of carp and catfish. I know people in Chicago who make the trip just to buy their smoked sturgeon.
