When people think of food in Des Moines, they think corn, corn, and more corn—but actually, there's some very creative regional cooking going on in America's corn basket. Or at least there has been for the last six years, when chef Andrew Meek opened his Des Moines lodestar for Iowan fine dining, the Sage Restaurant. Meek was born in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, but moved to Iowa after cooking in Savannah, Georgia. 'At first we thought that a chef moving to town from the coast would be a big draw," Meek told me on the phone, 'but it wasn't." Meek soon realized, he said, that 'Iowa is proud of Iowa," and so he set out to do the best regionally relevant cooking he could. Now he serves dishes like a roasted local breast of pheasant, served on a bed of locally milled Iowa polenta alongside local haricot verts and a green tomato salad. The locally raised lamb liver in a cream sauce made with cream from a local Iowa dairy is also popular. A lot of people would be surprised to know just how passionately folks in Des Moines take their food, Meek told me. 'We have a lot of academic, university people here, and a pretty well-developed group of what I'd call food-hippies: NPR-listening slow-food purists." These are the people that sell out his $250 a plate wine dinners, and don't blink at paying $10 a plate for heirloom tomatoes. Meek told me that while his restaurant has done a lot to show the locals what contemporary American fine cooking is all about, 'The people here just kind of get it too. You'll send a rare pheasant breast out and people love it, it's high-fives all around, and it's partly because they just know pheasant. They'll say, 'the last time I saw one of these, it was in a Crock-Pot, and you had to chew real carefully, because of the birdshot.'"
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