The Restaurant
801 Chophouse opened in 1993 on the second floor of the Principal Financial Tower at 801 Grand Avenue — the family-owned 801 Restaurant Group's founding location and the kitchen that established the brand's editorial template before the company expanded to Kansas City, Omaha, Leawood, and Denver. The dining room reads as a deliberate East-Coast steakhouse statement: dark wood paneling, white-cloth two-tops, a long bar with brass fittings at the back, and floor-to-ceiling windows onto Grand Avenue that frame the Principal tower lobby across the street. The room seats about 140 across the dining floor and a private dining annex that handles the city's larger corporate dinners.
The format is a classic American steakhouse executed at the upper end of the format. Signature plates include the 32-ounce bone-in Tomahawk ribeye, the 16-ounce dry-aged New York strip, an Australian Wagyu filet at MS9 grade, a hand-cut bone-in pork chop with a peach-and-bourbon glaze, and the room's reference shellfish tower built around East-Coast oysters and king crab claws. The classic steakhouse-side programme — creamed spinach, hash-brown potatoes, lobster macaroni and cheese, asparagus with béarnaise — is the closest the city offers to the New York Smith & Wollensky template, and the bar's old-fashioned and Manhattan programme has anchored Polk County's working business-cocktail map for three decades.
Service is captain-led and credentialed: career servers narrate the cuts with the kind of casual authority that the Manhattan steakhouses have made the format's currency, and a sommelier walks the room every evening to manage the eight-hundred-label wine list — anchored by Napa Cabernet, Bordeaux first-growths, and a deep California cult-Cabernet programme that has held its place since the room opened. The jacket-after-6pm dress code is the city's last formal one and reads as a credential rather than a friction. The Grand Avenue facade at twilight, with the Principal tower's amber lights catching the front windows, is the working insurance-corridor dining-room photograph. For a Des Moines evening that needs the city's most reliable steakhouse format, 801 is the address that founded it.
Why This Is Des Moines’s Close a Deal Pick
801 Chophouse is the Des Moines team-dinner room because the format scales for a Polk County closing without the host having to explain the format. The private dining annex holds groups of fourteen to twenty-four without the room losing its dining-floor energy — the working answer to the corporate-team-dinner problem that the city's smaller rooms cannot solve. The classic steakhouse menu means a colleague who wanted a Tomahawk ribeye and one who wanted a Mediterranean branzino both leave satisfied, which is the working dietary-variance answer in a Midwestern team setting. The Grand Avenue address — directly across from the Principal Financial Tower, two blocks from EMC Insurance, four blocks from the Wellmark Blue Cross building — means the after-dinner walk back to the office or hotel is itself the closing image of the evening. And the thirty-year tenure of the room reads as the kind of continuity that visiting clients recognise as a real Midwestern business institution. For an insurance-corridor team dinner in any season, 801 is the standing answer.
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