The Restaurant
Proudfoot & Bird occupies the ground-floor dining room of the Hotel Fort Des Moines on Walnut Street — the 1919 brick-and-limestone hotel that Curio Collection by Hilton restored to its original Beaux-Arts glamour in 2021 — and takes its name from the original hotel architects, Proudfoot, Bird & Rawson. The dining room reads as a deliberate editorial answer to the building: marble-topped two-tops, an intricate gold-inlaid ceiling, plush velvet banquette seating, and a grand circular bar that anchors the back of the room. Executive Chef James Richards, an Iowa native who trained at the Iowa Culinary Institute before spending nearly a decade in Las Vegas under Emeril Lagasse, leads the hotel's entire culinary program from this kitchen.
The format is a modern American steakhouse with serious pasta and seafood programmes — a deliberate broadening of the city's steakhouse default. Signature plates include a 32-day dry-aged ribeye from R&R Provisions in Mason City, a hand-cut Bolognese over pappardelle made in the back kitchen, a pan-seared diver scallop with butternut-squash purée and brown butter, a duck-breast plate with Castelvetrano olives and citrus-cured kumquats, and the room's signature carved-tableside Châteaubriand for two — a credentialed steakhouse format that the city's other chophouses do not run. The wine list is the second credential: about two hundred labels with deliberate Napa Cabernet, Oregon Pinot, and Tuscan Sangiovese depth, anchored by an award-winning bottle programme that the hotel rebuilt during the 2021 restoration.
Service is the older school of grand-hotel hospitality: career captains, table-side preparations for the Châteaubriand and the bananas Foster, and a sommelier who walks the room twice each evening. The happy-hour-to-dinner overlap (2:30–5pm bar, 5–10pm dinner) means the room cycles through a daytime business crowd and an evening dining clientele without the gap that hollows out most hotel dining rooms. The Walnut Street facade at twilight — the gold-inlaid ceiling visible through the front windows, the bar lit from above, the slow downtown pedestrian traffic — is one of the city's most photographed restaurant images. For a Des Moines evening that needs to register as the metro's deal-closing dining room rather than an interchangeable chophouse, Proudfoot & Bird is the address.
Why This Is Des Moines’s Close a Deal Pick
Proudfoot & Bird is the Des Moines close-a-deal room because the architecture itself does the credential the host cannot manufacture. The 1919 Beaux-Arts hotel lobby with its intricate gold-inlaid ceiling reads as continuity rather than corporate polish — the kind of room that says the city has been doing business at this address for a century. The marble-topped two-tops and velvet banquettes scale for a two-person deal conversation or a six-person closing dinner without the table feeling like a board meeting. The Châteaubriand-for-two carving cart is the conversational opener that converts a transactional steakhouse dinner into an evening — and the Walnut Street drop-off line, three blocks from the Principal Financial tower and the EMC Insurance headquarters, solves the after-dinner transit problem that the suburban steakhouses cannot. For a Polk County deal that needs to close on hospitality as much as on terms, Proudfoot & Bird is the city's answer.
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