Growing up just 40 miles from Des Moines, I was really in tune with many of the more popular restaurants a number of years ago. But not living there for nearly 30 years has made it so that I'm not that familiar with some of the newer restaurants in the area. These days I have to rely upon recommendations from other people who live in the Des Moines area. One of the Des Moines area blogs that I've followed for a number of years is the Slakingfool who delves into a number of interesting subjects including brewpubs and bars, some interesting restaurants, and travel (mainly by trains). I happened to catch one of his recent posts on his Twitter feed and he re-tweeted a picture of a sandwich from a place in Des Moines by the name of The Walnut. I wasn't familiar with The Walnut, but it piqued my interest enough that I made a mental note to go there for lunch at some point. That point was last month when I was in Des Moines before heading out of town and I decided to head for The Walnut and have lunch.
Ben Norris and Hunter Wilson were buddies who started out on the ground floor of the food truck revolution when they opened their mobile kitchen "The Spot" in 2013. They specialized in sandwiches made with locally-sourced foods. The Spot became one of the more popular food trucks over the first couple years of business.
As more and more food trucks came into existence, the two knew they had to do something that was unique compared to their competitors. Visibility and having your regular customers find you are the two biggest keys to owning a food truck. In 2015, Wilson and Norris rented space in a lot in downtown Des Moines at the corner of 12th and Walnut in which to put their food truck.
Pictured right - Hunter Wilson and Ben Norris. Photo courtesy the Des Moines Register.
Not far from where their food truck was located, a local developer had purchased a building that used to house a tire and battery company on the ground floor and a publishing company on the upper floor. In the burgeoning days of automobile sales in Des Moines, the west end of Walnut Street in the downtown area housed a number of car dealerships, repair garages and other automobile related businesses. The developers were turning the building - which was initially built in 1924 and added onto in 1928 - into commercial space on the ground floor and residential housing on the second floor.
By 2017, much of the west side of the ground floor of the building was already leased and the landlords were looking for a possible restaurant to come in to take the other half of the building. Norris felt Wilson and he had cut their teeth long enough in the food truck business to be able to run their own brick-and-mortar establishment. After signing a lease on the 3500 square foot space just two blocks away from their food truck rented space, Norris sold the food truck to a couple in the Minneapolis suburbs. The partners focused on the development of the restaurant that would continue to feature sandwiches that made The Spot one of the more popular food trucks in Des Moines, but expand the menu to include eclectic appetizers, burgers and salads. Norris and Wilson brought in Justin Stokes as the restaurant's general manager and they opened the Walnut in October of 2017.
I pulled up in front of The Walnut around 1:30 one recent weekday afternoon. (see map) Parking was abundant on the street in front of the building. Upon entering the restaurant, I found an open floor plan with windows on the south and east side which allowed a lot of natural light to cascade on the dining area. A small bar area was along the north wall with a handful of flat screen televisions affixed to the wall behind the bar. There is an outdoor patio area on the east side of the building.
The original garage doors from the tire and battery company were on the front of the building, and the concrete floor was restored to its original state when the building was completed over 90 years ago. The windows were also restored with the original panes. It was a nice mixture of a contemporary and antique industrial design in the building.
I ended up taking a seat at the bar and a young lady came out to greet me. She was very friendly and handed me a menu to get started. She asked me if I wanted anything to drink and they had a number of Iowa craft beers from Exile Brewing Company, Big Grove Brewery and West O Beer. However, I was pleasantly surprised that they also offered Kona Big Wave on tap. I ordered up a Big Wave while I looked through the menu.
As I said, many of the sandwiches that The Spot food truck was famous for migrated onto the menu at The Walnut. The Royal Bird features a sage-rubbed grilled chicken breast with prosciutto, lettuce, tomato and onion, then topped with a red wine vinegar mayo and parmesan cheese. The Tabasco Turkey Melt had an herb-rubbed turkey breast topped with pepper jack cheese and a Tabasco-infused butter. And the Portobello, Pesto and Swiss sandwich was basically just that - grilled portobello mushroom with fresh pesto, Swiss cheese, with lettuce, tomato slices, and red onions.
They also had burgers at The Walnut including a mushroom/Swiss cheese burger that I was looking very hard at. Their Bacon, Blue and BBQ burger featured a burger topped with bacon, blue cheese crumbles and a barbecue sauce. And their Al Pastor burger featured ground pork topped with grilled pineapple, white onion slices, cilantro, and a citrus aioli. Appetizers such as stuffed mushrooms, Kalua pork sliders and burnt end pork belly were on the menu, as well as soups and salads. And on Saturdays, The Walnut serves their own version of the Hawaiian Loco Moco bowl with a hamburger patty on a bed of rice topped with a fried egg, brown gravy and chives.
As I said, I was leaning toward getting the mushroom/Swiss burger, but they also had a traditional reuben on the sandwich part of the menu. I did see grilled mahi mahi tacos, but then the fine print at the bottom said, "Fridays Only" I was sort of crestfallen at that, so it was down to the burger or the reuben. I was in a quandary trying to decide between the two until my bartender/server came up to me and said, "We do have a special that isn't on today's menu."
And as I mentioned in my opening paragraph of this post, a couple three days before the Slakingfool had retweeted a picture of a meatball sandwich from The Walnut. It looked ungodly delicious. Well, it turned out that the meatball sandwich was the lunch special AGAIN that day! I didn't even hesitate when she told me that was the special.
The meatball sandwich wasn't all that large, but it was filled with four meatballs, topped with a tangy marinara sauce with mozzarella cheese melted and carmelized on top of a soft and spongy hoagie bun that was cut in half. Actually, the outer shell of the hoagie bread was sort of crispy from the cooking process, but it was still soft and chewy when you bit into it. The sandwich wasn't much in terms of any exotic ingredients, but it was especially delicious. It went extremely well with the second pint of the Kona Big Wave that I ordered before my sandwich was given to me.
After I finished up at the bar for lunch, I took a quick tour around the perimeter of The Walnut looking at a number of historical pictures of the downtown Des Moines area that were on the wall in a back alcove area of the restaurant. I'm always interested to see buildings from back in the 1940's, 1950's and 1960's that I remembered seeing when I was a little kid. Some are still in use, others are long gone.
The Walnut is one of those very comfortable and laid back places that I like to find during my travels. The menu wasn't all that extensive, but it was interesting enough to have me be interested in three or four things. Their craft beer menu also wasn't all that long, but the beers that they had were all very good and hit all the right tastes. I can't say enough about the service that I received from the very nice bartender/server who seemed to be on top of my every need while I was there. The owners did a very good job of turning what was a popular food truck enterprise into what seems to be a very good and thriving brick and mortar restaurant in The Walnut.
Ben…hello. We
Met Tim
Today and looked at your old place . Just wanting to hear your thoughts about it?
Posted by: Leah Heggerston | August 15, 2023 at 08:22 PM