About Us

image

Welcome to Iowa Foodie! We are Grant and Amy and we spend entirely too much time thinking about all things food - from taking a drive to visit a local creamery to making our own bacon, we have a real passion for anything tasty. But what’s food without drinks? Boring, that’s what. We love road trips where we can stop in at the local watering hole for a beer and some conversation. We keep track of our stops in small (and big) towns in ‘The Bar Book,’ with 480+ bars and counting. And for us, finding the best breaded tenderloin in Iowa is an ongoing pursuit.

Our backgrounds combine a substantial number of years in the restaurant and food service industries. Grant’s been everything from a line cook to an executive chef. Amy has waitressed, cooked, managed a bar and sold wine. And oh yeah, we used to own a restaurant! Grant made all of the soups, breads, rolls, salad dressings and most other menu items from scratch. In fact, he often creates fabulous dishes with whatever is on hand, rarely following a recipe exactly. We’ve paid our foodie dues.

We love to eat great food and appreciate the impressive variety of restaurants in the greater Des Moines area. While we tend to throw our support toward locally owned restaurants, we’re not against the occasional order of mango-habanero wings at BWW. We don’t consider ourselves restaurant critics and we write posts, not reviews. Getting to know the chefs, servers and bartenders at local establishments is one of the best parts of dining out for us. Besides, shooting several photos of our food hardly makes us anonymous diners. We’re just looking to have a great meal at some unique and interesting places and then telling y’all about it.

And if that’s not enough jaunty banter about us, here’s a bit more detail:

Grant hails from the northwest Iowa town of Sheldon, where he started working at a local bakery at 15 and has never worked outside of the food business since. He maintains a borderline unhealthy obsession with growing the perfect tomato, has a definitely unhealthy love of chicharrones, and wonders what happened to the tannin in Zinfandel. He brews beer in his garage for his private label Lost Peacock Brewery and just found out he really does like celeriac. His newly found interest in charcuterie has resulted in some mighty tasty pastrami and bratwurst and he keeps his smoker running all winter long. He’s a certified BBQ judge with the Kansas City BBQ Society and tries not to eat all of the chicken thighs at contests even though it’s his favorite and he can’t help it.

Amy grew up in Grand Portage, Minnesota - a tiny Ojibwe reservation on the shores of Lake Superior where lake trout, moose meat, and wild rice were not a bad introduction to great tasting food. A resident of Iowa for over 20 years now, she’s been a DJ, a customer support rep and a QA Specialist and hopes one day to become a professional tourist. She loves champagne, steak, bacon, burgers, bacon ON burgers, and is not afraid of boxed wine. She loves to travel and secretly dreams of running away to Louisiana to play accordion in a Cajun dance hall. She has a B.A. in English/Communications and now uses that degree to write bad ass blog posts for Iowa Foodie. Her mother is so proud. She loves photography and routinely pisses off her family and friends by taking photos of EVERYTHING.

We’re an unpretentious, sometimes goofy couple and we believe sharing a meal with friends and strangers alike is the most fun you can have. So pull up a chair and stay for supper.

We write all of the text for our posts and take all of the photos we use.

We’d be thrilled to have you follow us… just not in a creepy way. Please click on our RSS feed to subscribe to Iowa Foodie.