Overnight Stay: Des Moines, Iowa
Spend a delicious day in Iowa's capital city eating breaded pork tenderloin sandwiches and drinking smoked painkillers. Here are 7 spots to check out.
Welcome to the weekend!
In today’s newsletter, we’re off to Des Moines, Iowa, the capital and largest city in the state. There’s a fun dining scene brewing here, with restaurants serving Aussie dishes and beloved local classics like breaded pork tenderloin sandwiches (if you’ve never had one, let us induct you into the club!). Plus, there are cocktail bars serving smoked painkillers and curry Negronis. Our Overnight Stay newsletter is an itinerary featuring everything you need for a perfect day in a destination, including coffee, breakfast, lunch, dinner, and drinks, and is a paid subscriber exclusive. You can find more than a dozen Overnight Stays in our archives if you’re heading somewhere else for Memorial Day weekend!
If a trip to Charleston, South Carolina sounds good right about now, we’ve just updated our Charleston Field Guide, a robust 74-page, six-day itinerary to the city featuring all our favorite spots to eat and drink. The downloadable guide is for sale for $20 on our website, but paid American Weekender subscribers get this guide for free, along with free access to our full library of guides and our American Weekender Google Map.
Finally, in this week’s Weekend Reading, we’ve pulled together some great reads. Learn about the best Texas-style barbecue dish in
, a great California town for food lovers, a steakhouse tour of Montana, and Columbus-style pizza.Thanks for reading.
— Amy Cavanaugh & Kenney Marlatt
Doing Up Des Moines
DES MOINES, IOWA — Located smack in the center of Iowa, the capital of Des Moines has a lot going on. In the spring and summer, you can visit to take in an Iowa Cubs game (they’re the Triple-A affiliate of the Chicago Cubs), while in the winter you can escape to the Greater Des Moines Botanical Garden, which is filled with tropical and desert plants. The city is situated on the Des Moines River, which flows through downtown, and you can stroll along the River Walk. The metro area is growing quickly, and that rise is evident in the food scene, which is drawing in chefs from places like Chicago. If you have one day to spend in Des Moines, we’ve put together our picks for seven spots that will give you a good feel for the city and its food scene, from classic breaded pork tenderloins to boundary-blurring cocktails.