Last fall, my wife and I were up in North Liberty visiting family and I noticed a new restaurant off Highway 965 just south of the Hy-Vee grocery store. "What's this place," I asked as we drove by the building with a packed parking lot. My wife wasn't familiar with it, so she called her dad whose place we had just left.
"Oh, yeah," he said. "That's that new place. We had breakfast there not too long ago. It's pretty good!"
Since then, my wife has been back in the area and had been to the restaurant a couple times with other people. However, we were recently in North Liberty and before we left town I suggested we get something to eat. "Hey, let's try that one new restaurant," I said. My wife wholeheartedly agreed and we set off to have lunch at Barrett's Quality Eats.
Cory Barrett grew up in the small town of Oak Harbor, OH about halfway between Toledo and Sandusky in the northwest part of the state. As a young boy, he was would help his mother and grandmother in the kitchen as they prepared large meals for the family. Barrett caught the culinary bug and decided to pursue a degree in culinary sciences at Baker College in Muskegon, MI. While in collage, Barrett focused on pastry and savory baking techniques.
In 2004, Barrett's first job out of culinary school was as the head pastry chef at Tribute, a highly popular restaurant in the Detroit suburb of Farmington Hills. It was at Tribute when Barrett met chef Michael Symon who was the owner of the trendy and acclaimed Lola restaurant in Cleveland. Barrett and Symon became fast friends and kept in touch as each other's career evolved.
Pictured right - Cory Barrett. Photo courtesy the Des Moines Register.
In 2005, Barrett moved to Las Vegas to be the head pastry chef at Okada, an award winning Japanese restaurant in the Wynn. But in February of 2006, Michael Symon convinced Barrett to join him as the pastry chef at Lola which had moved from its original location in Cleveland's Tremont neighborhood and reopened in downtown Cleveland. During Barrett's time at Lola, Symon won the Food Network's Iron Chef America contest in 2008 becoming a household name with food enthusiasts across the country.
After working with Symon for four years, Barrett took on a new challenge as the head pastry chef at The Herbfarm, a sustainable, farm-to-fork restaurant in the Seattle suburb of Woodinville, WA that served nine-course tasting meals. But after a year working in the Seattle restaurant, Symon was able to coerce Barrett to come back to Cleveland to be the head chef at Lola where he did that for a few months before deciding to move on to be an instructor at his alma mater Baker College. During his stint as a pastry chef at the various restaurants he worked at, Barrett was a James Beard Award semi-finalist three times in the pastry category.
As an instructor at Baker College, it gave Barrett more freedom to explore and learn from other restaurants around the nation. It also gave him the time to participate as a sous chef in 19 episodes of Iron Chef America. In 2016, Barrett moved on to Kalamazoo Valley Community College as a faculty member. While at Kalamazoo Valley, Barrett participated in - and won - the Food Network's Spring Baking Championship in 2018.
During his short stint at The Herbfarm out in Washington state, Barrett met a sous chef by the name of Ben Smart. Smart eventually moved to Iowa to become the head chef at Big Grove Brewery in Solon, IA. Smart and Barrett kept in touch over the years and Smart kept telling Barrett the virtues of running a quality restaurant in Iowa. In January of 2020, Barrett was named the co-director of the culinary arts program at Kalamazoo Valley while also maintaining a side business as a caterer and teaching private classes.
But by 2021 after the throes of COVID, Barrett was ready to take the plunge. In the summer of 2022, Barrett moved his family to the Iowa City area to look for sites for his restaurant. In late 2022, he found a plot of land on the far north side of Coralville. Construction on the restaurant's building started in early 2023 building from the ground up. In late June of 2023, Barrett's Quality Eats held a soft opening with a full opening on July 5, 2023.
Also known as Barrett's All Day, the restaurant specializes in hardy, yet eclectic breakfast items, as well as deli sandwiches and salads up to 3 p.m. For dinners, Barrett wanted to bring a different level to what Iowans call "comfort food" such as sautéed walleye, a dry-rubbed pork chop, braised short rib with celery root purée and carrots, and a crispy fried half chicken served with creamed corn, celery and Maytag blue cheese. And on Friday and Saturday nights, Barrett's Quality Eats offers rotisserie prime rib dinners.
While people may say that Barrett's Quality Eats is in North Liberty, as I thought it was, it's just inside the Coralville town limit on Crosspark Road. (see map) It was about 1 p.m. when we went into Barrett's. It's counter service at the restaurant where you order and they bring your food to you. The menus were in a basket next to the cash register where we placed our order. The young lady at the front counter was very accommodating with our order that we ended up splitting. And to entice you even more, the fresh basked croissants, muffins, breads and pastries were in cases in the front on a half-wall of green and white tiles.
Opposite the main ordering counter was the coffee stand where a barista made fresh coffee, espresso, mochas, and teas. My wife ordered an iced tea and the young lady got it for her at the coffee counter. Barrett's Quality Eats has partnered with a Sioux City-based coffee wholesaler - Stone Bru Coffee - to provide the beans for the coffee drinks served at the restaurant.
It was a nice day and we considered sitting outside in Barrett's spacious patio. When we looked on the patio, all the tables with umbrellas were taken. And my wife wasn't really looking to be sitting in the sun baking in the summer heat. Unfortunately by the time we were leaving, a handful of tables with umbrellas had opened up.
There are two inside dining areas. Above right is the larger dining area in the far back of the restaurant. It featured an array of windows that allowed natural light to come in and make the room bright even without the help of lighting. Wooden plank banquette seating was along the wall in front of the windows while across the room large booths lined that wall.
In between the front ordering/coffee/pastry area and the back dining room was a smaller dining area that also had banquette seating along a wall that was adorned with decorative bundt cake pans. Tables with either two or four seats were along the wall with floor to ceiling windows. A decorative tile floor gave the room sort of an art-deco scheme. It matched the tile motif on the front of the main counter and the coffee counter in the main entry way up front. Music from a diverse mix of artists such as Ringo Starr, Hollis Brown, Kings of Leon, R.E.M., and a surprise play from G. Love and Special Sauce was playing in the background.
They did have beer offered at Barrett's Quality Eats and I got a can of the Easy Eddy hazy IPA from Big Grove Brewery. Barrett's also offers specialty cocktails including a special dirty martini that my wife didn't order because it was too early in the day. A number of white and red wines - mainly from the west coast, but also varieties from New Zealand, Italy and France - were available either by the bottle or glass.
While standing waiting to order food, I had to peruse the bakery case to check out the pastries and desserts they had at Barrett's. And I found a blueberry custard muffin that just jumped out at me. It was a custard filled muffin with blueberry compote throughout the muffin with a dollop of blueberry compote on top. And it was FABULOUS!!! OH MY GOD!!! This thing was one of the best muffins I've ever tasted. And it was - OH! - so rich! But it wasn't cheap - $4.50 for the muffin. But it was so good that I didn't care. I would crawl back for a blueberry custard muffin at Barrett's.
I didn't want to get anything heavy for lunch as I knew we would be eating a larger meal later in the evening. The avocado B.L.T. looked good to me and my wife had said that she got the tuna sandwich on one of her earlier visits. She proposed splitting a sandwich and getting a salad. I thought that was a good idea. The young lady at the front counter said that she would split both the sandwich and the salad for us. And that's how it was presented to us. The sandwich was sort of small for what they charged for it ($14.95), but it was pretty good. The garden salad was also a bit pricey ($12.95) with mixed greens, cucumber slices, chopped tomatoes, carrots and radishes mixed in. She ordered the red wine vinaigrette to go with the salad. I will say that it was a lot of greens on the plate to go with the sandwich.
I'm really hoping that Barrett's Quality Eats makes it. I thought it was a little expensive for what it was - our lunch with the muffin was over $40 bucks before tax and a small tip for the counter service. To uproot your family and move 500 miles to open a restaurant at a time when there's market volatility for eateries is quite the gamble on Cory Barrett's part. While I thought that the food was good for no more than what it was (tuna salad sandwich, mix greens salad), I also thought it was sort of expensive. But the blueberry custard muffin was well worth the $4.50 we were charged for it. I don't know if Iowans will pay more for eclectic comfort foods, deli items, and artisan breakfast selections. Only time will tell...
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