The Restaurant
Alba occupies a converted East-6th-Street storefront in Des Moines's Historic East Village under chef-owner Jason Simon, who opened the room in 2006 after returning to Iowa from kitchens in Chicago and Napa. The restaurant earned a 2010 James Beard Foundation Restaurant Award nomination — at the time the only Iowa restaurant on that ballot — and was voted Best Restaurant by the Des Moines Register in both 2010 and 2011. The dining room reads as a deliberate editorial answer to the polished East-Village format: funky reclaimed antique doors used as wall panels, rotating local artwork selected by Simon himself, an open kitchen visible from every seat in the house, a chef's table directly at the pass, a covered patio onto East 6th, and a small wine bar at the front that holds eight seats for the city's most-photographed by-the-glass programme.
The format is a contemporary American carte that pivots weekly with named Iowa producers — the menu prints the farms and the cuts with the kind of editorial honesty that has made Alba the East Village's working farm-to-table reference. Signature plates have included a Niman Ranch hanger steak with chimichurri and crispy potatoes, a roasted Maple Leaf duck breast with sour-cherry jus and farro, a pan-seared Atlantic halibut with brown-butter capers and asparagus, a hand-cut beef tartare with smoked egg yolk and frites, and the room's signature gnocchi with brown butter, sage, and Parmigiano-Reggiano that the kitchen has refused to retire across twenty years of menu turns. The dessert card — a brown-butter cake with bourbon caramel, a dark-chocolate budino with sea salt and olive oil — has held its own following.
Service is informal and informed: the staff narrates each plate's producer without overselling it, the by-the-glass programme runs about thirty-five labels with deliberate natural-wine and Burgundy depth, and the chef's table at the pass — six seats directly facing the open kitchen — is the city's most-booked single-evening counter. Simon himself works the floor most service nights. The East 6th storefront at twilight, with the antique doors lit from above and the open-kitchen ticket line visible through the front window, is one of the East Village's most photographed dining-room images. For a Des Moines evening that wants editorial neighborhood dining rather than downtown hotel formality, Alba is the city's working East-Village answer.
Why This Is Des Moines’s Birthday Pick
Alba is the Des Moines birthday room because the format scales for any size of celebration. A table of two takes the chef's table at the pass and lets Simon's kitchen narrate the evening. A table of eight orders across the carte without arguing over a cuisine and lets the by-the-glass programme close the evening with a tasting flight. The wine bar at the front — eight seats, a selected rotating Burgundy-and-natural-wine list, the city's most-photographed by-the-glass pour — is the conversational opener that converts a dinner reservation into an evening. The East 6th address, three blocks from the State Capitol grounds and the East Village's main retail spine, means the after-dinner walk through the historic district is the closing image of the celebration. And Simon's continued presence at the pass — twenty years in, no franchise expansion, no consulting-firm rebrand — reads as the kind of working continuity that a Polk County birthday dinner needs. For an East-Village celebration in any season, Alba is the answer.
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