During our late summer vacation in West Central Iowa, we were staying at my sister's fiancé's lake home on Lake Panorama about an hour's drive west of Des Moines. Being the adventurous people that we can be, my wife and took off one cloudy and cool day and drove around to the east side of the lake to see what was over there. We found a large hotel and on one end of the property we saw a sign that said "Tiki Bar". We parked our car and went down a walkway to what was a closed up outdoor tiki bar and patio. I looked up to a level above the deck and saw what looked like a bar. We walked up to the door and it was locked. However, a gentleman wearing a chef's jacket popped off one of the stools at the bar and came over to open the door for us. I explained that we had seen the "Tiki Bar" sign and we wanted to check it out. The chef - a boisterous man with a commanding voice - apologized and said that the Tiki Bar wasn't open that day due to the weather. "But we're open in here," he said. When we found out that it was a combination hotel/restaurant/bar called The Port at Lake Panorama, we instantly put this place in line for a meal during our stay in the area.
The convivial gentleman in the chef's coat was Mike McGuigan, the head chef and proprietor of the restaurant at the Port at Lake Panorama. He was enjoying a glass of wine at 4 p.m. in the afternoon. As my wife and I sat at the bar and ordered a couple drinks - a mai tai for me and a vodka cranberry for my wife - I said in a half joking manner, "I like restaurants where the chef has a wine before he goes in and cooks."
"Oh, no," Chef Mike replied quickly. "I'm off tonight. But we have a very talented sous chef manning the kitchen tonight and our grill chef is one of the best around." We were the only ones in the bar and Chef Mike was barking out orders and directing his crew in the bar area. The girl behind the bar said, "I can vouch for the grill chef. He's my brother!" Chef Mike was demanding, yet he wasn't doing it in a mean or forceful tone. Once he got his troops in line, he sat down at the far end of the square bar and we asked him his story.
Mike McGuigan grew up in Philadelphia, but his first real kitchen job was at a high end restaurant at a posh hotel in New York City. McGuigan said in an interview one time that he thought he was the smartest guy in the kitchen when it turned out that he really didn't know what the hell he was doing. But the head chef at the restaurant saw some potential in him and the company that owned the restaurant ended up sending him off for a two-year course at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, NY. In exchange for a free ride at the C.I.A., McGuigan signed a five-year personal services contract with the company that sent him to school.
After graduation, McGuigan was sent to a number of places where he would work for six months before going on to another place. One of the places he was sent to was Des Moines to work in the venerable Johnny and Kay's Hyatt House restaurant, one of the top restaurants in the area during its day. It was in Des Moines at Johnny and Kay's where McGuigan met his future wife, Peggy. The two married before he was transferred back to New York for a two-year stint. When Peggy became pregnant with their first child in the late 70's, she gave McGuigan an ultimatum - she was moving back to Iowa with or without him. McGuigan remembered the old adage - Happy wife, happy life - and he moved back to Des Moines to start a family. He was hired as a chef at the old Savery Hotel in 1979 and remained there until the hotel was shut down due to the epic Flood of 1993.
McGuigan bounced around at a handful of restaurants in the Des Moines area in the subsequent years - places such as 801 Chophouse, Guido's and Fratello's to name a few - before opening his own place, The Radish in the Des Moines suburb of Grimes in 2007. It was located in an old house and was a destination restaurant for many people from the Des Moines and Ames areas in Central Iowa.
When the dam on the Raccoon River was finally finished in 1969, it created Lake Panorama, a private association of land owners who began purchasing lots around what would be the lake's perimeter starting in 1967. By April of 1971, the lake was completely full and the gates were raised for the first time. A year later, a group of investors who called themselves Lake Enterprises, Inc. (LEI) purchased a five acre tract of land on the east side of the lake with the plan to put in a restaurant/lounge with the possibility of building a hotel at some point in time.
The restaurant and lounge was eventually built in 1975 and opened in 1976. However, the draw for the restaurant wasn't that good and in the first year of business it lost $200,000. By the time investors started to pull out of the project, the losses amounted to about $500,000. The investment group declared bankruptcy and became insolvent. However, one of the early investors, David Garst - who would eventually become president of his family seed company, Garst Seed - took over the assets of the property. He owned The Port until 1982 when he sold it to Paul and Linda Wendl who owned a small restaurant in Panora.
The hotel was eventually built and the Wendl's ran the operation until selling it in 1994. A series of owners had stakes in the property before Menadue Development, an Ankeny, IA property management company owned by local doctor David Menadue, bought the property in 2004. Menadue also owns a hotel and restaurant in Ankeny. (The restaurant - Ankeny Diner - was profiled here on Road Tips nearly two years ago to the day.)
The Port went through a series of starts and stops with a series of different chefs and manager before Menadue Development went to Mike McGuigan in 2017 to see if he would be interested in running the place. Wanting a challenge of helping turn around a restaurant, McGuigan jumped at the chance and he became the chef/manager of both the restaurant and the hotel - also known as the Lakeside Inn - in February of 2018.
In mid-October of last year on a Sunday, a fire that originated in a dumpster outside the kitchen area raced through the kitchen and caused several thousand dollars in damage. The restaurant was closed and the fire was discovered by an employee who just happened to stop by the restaurant that day. The kitchen was destroyed and the dining room was extensively damaged, although there was little to no damage to the attached hotel. The fire was a double-edge sword for McGuigan - he knew the place would be closed for repairs for a long time, but it also gave him the opportunity to put in the kitchen and reconfigure the lay-out of the restaurant, something that McGuigan felt The Port needed.
At first, they thought they would have to just demolish the restaurant and start over. However, it soon became evident that they could use the shell of the structure and work with that. The bar was moved out away from the wall and made into a four-sided configuration. What used to be two doors that went out to the patio deck became just one door with a window where the second door once was. The kitchen got all new appliances and equipment - including a new ventilation system that improved temperature conditions in the kitchen where it could get well over 100 degrees (F) at times. Bathrooms were updated and all new electrical wiring replaced the original 70's era "out-of-code" wiring. New fixtures and lighting in the dining room rounded out the extensive updates that totaled an estimated $1.3 to $1.5 million dollars. In June of this year - a little over two months before we were there - the Port at Lake Panorama reopened.
After our initial visit, we went back over to the east side of the lake for dinner a couple three evenings later. The Port at Lake Panorama is located just off of Iowa Highway 4, about a mile north of Panora. (see map) The parking lot was much more full when were there this time and the Tiki Bar was definitely open as it was a much nicer evening than on our first visit.
The view from the deck at The Port looked west on the main cove at Lake Panorama. The main marina on the lake - Coulter's Panorama Marine - sits off to the side of the cove from The Port. The Lake Panorama lighthouse sits on a point out from the marina in front of the view of the cove from The Port. It was a beautiful late summer evening when we were there.
The Tiki Bar was open that evening, but being that it was the middle of the week there weren't a lot of people around it. On some weekends in the summer months, they'll have a live band performing on a small stage in a courtyard in front of the lake. We went back there on a Friday night with my sister and her fiancé to watch a local band that was playing. They had a much larger crowd that evening than when we were there for dinner.
We went inside to go to the restaurant and hung out around the bar for a bit while they figured out where they were going to seat us. We had no idea that they had just reopened about 8 weeks prior from a devastating fire. Everything in the restaurant with the open bar area was clean and pristine.
The young hostess led us to a table in an area off the main dining area near the bar. It was a long and narrow part of the restaurant with a nice view of the lake. After dropping off a couple of menus for us, we ordered some pre-dinner drinks from our waitress, a young lady by the name of Tasheena. I got a Big Grove Easy Eddy IPA while my wife got a glass of the house pinot grigio.
It was a concise menu at The Port with a mixture of steaks, seafood, pork chops, and chicken dishes available. I was sort of surprised to see the number of Italian dishes on the menu including chicken parmesan, sun-dried tomato pasta, and a broccoli alfredo with a choice of chicken, shrimp or salmon added for an upcharge. Appetizers included blackened sautéed mushrooms, calamari, and breaded provolone cheese sticks that are deep fried and served with a house-made marinara.
We both got salads to start out. I got the blue cheese vinaigrette that turned out to be somewhat mystifying to me. Instead of chunks of blue cheese, the salad featured fine crumbles of blue cheese mixed in with the dressing and the greens. And there weren't many of the small crumbles of blue cheese on the salad. I just sort of shrugged my shoulders and ate it. It was pretty underwhelming.
My wife was in the mood for something along the lines of fettuccine, but she was also interested in the chicken piccata. Turns out that she could have both by ordering the chicken piccata. The veggie of the day was Brussels sprouts and she got that as a side. There were a lot of capers on her chicken piccata, but she didn't seem to mind that. She thought her choice was a solid one and was very happy with what she ordered.
I thought seriously about getting the chicken parm, but I ended up going the pasta route and I got the cavatelli. It was a pasta bake with cavatelli pasta, Graziano Brothers sausage with The Port's housemade marinara. It was mixed with ricotta cheese, then topped with a liberal helping of mozzarella and baked in the oven until the cheese caramelized. It looked good and I was eager to dig in. However, the first bite yielded a very salty taste. In fact, each bite after that was pretty salty in taste. I don't eat a lot of salt and this was very pronounced in the flavor. It was sort of disappointing as I don't know if it was the sausage (it probably wasn't - I've had Graziano Brothers sausage before) or in the cheese (probably not either). I determined that it was probably added in the kitchen as it was a very forward salty flavor.
What was also interesting to me was that my pasta bake came with a choice of a side - either the Brussels sprouts veggie of the day, or a choice of potato. I didn't want a potato dish to come with my pasta. I thought it was rather strange that it was offered to me by our waitress. Brussels sprouts would have been more reasonable, but I didn't want that either. I just told our server to just bring me the pasta and forget about the sides.
When we told my sister and her fiancé that we went to The Port for dinner, they were impressed that we went there. However, when I told my sister's fiancé that my cavatelli was too salty, he said, "Did you say something to Mike? He always wants to know if you're not happy." I didn't and I'm wasn't going to make a big deal of it. It was somewhat disappointing to me, but I'm sure others who use salt liberally in their meals would probably like it.
One other thing that was rather mystifying to my wife and me - we were never offered a choice of dessert after our meal. We saw other people get offered and ordering dessert by other waitresses, but our waitress didn't give us the option. While we weren't certain we would have ordered dessert, we just thought it was sort of strange that it was never offered.
While my wife thought her chicken piccata on a bed of fettuccine alfredo was good - even with a load of capers on it - I was sort of disappointed with my cavatelli. It was just too salty for my taste buds. But you can't go wrong with the updated facilities after the fire The Port went through last year. It was a nice open space and was very nice inside. It was tough to beat the view of Lake Panorama - especially at sunset - from the inside of the restaurant or out on the patio overlooking their Tiki hut. The service we experienced was sort of choppy - we didn't get offered dessert, even though we weren't certain we would have ordered dessert IF offered. Given the background of the chef/manager, I guess I expected something a little better than what we experienced at The Port at Lake Panorama.