You’ve probably seen the plywood. Or maybe you just pulled up to Locust Street, stomach growling for a Bombshell Brunch, only to find the doors at Americana locked tight. It’s a gut-punch. For over a decade, the Western Gateway was the "it" spot in Des Moines. It was where you went before a show at the Temple or after wandering through the Pappajohn Sculpture Park.
But lately? The vibe has shifted.
The recent wave of western gateway restaurant closures Des Moines residents are mourning isn't just a streak of bad luck. It's a fundamental reshaping of how our downtown works. When a titan like Americana shutters after 14 years, people notice. When Ritual Cafe—a sanctuary for the artsy and caffeinated for twenty years—calls it quits, it feels like the neighborhood is losing its soul.
The Shifting Pulse of Locust and Grand
Honestly, the Western Gateway used to feel bulletproof. You had the big corporate anchors like Wells Fargo and Kum & Go (now Maverik) providing a steady stream of lunch crowds. You had the festivals. You had the "cool factor."
Then 2024 and 2025 happened.
The math just stopped adding up for a lot of owners. Americana's closure in September 2025 was the biggest domino to fall, but it wasn't the first. Blu Thai Food and Sushi went quiet. Ritual Cafe, right next door, served its last vegan wrap earlier that summer.
Why? Because the "lunch rush" basically went extinct.
With hybrid work becoming the permanent law of the land, those thousands of office workers who used to grab a $15 salad on Tuesday are now making sandwiches in their kitchens in Ankeny or Waukee. Scott Carlson, who owned Americana, was pretty blunt about it: weekday business just plummeted. When your rent is based on 2019 foot traffic but your reality is 2026 ghost-town Tuesdays, you’re in trouble.
The "Festival Paradox"
Here is something most people get wrong. You’d think the 80/35 Music Festival or the Des Moines Arts Festival would be a goldmine for these places, right?
Kinda. But mostly no.
Local legends like Paul Rottenberg (the guy behind Centro and Django) and Chris Diebel of Bubba have been vocal about this for a while. When the city shuts down Locust and Grand for a big event, it creates a fortress. If you aren't inside the festival paying for a ticket, you aren't coming downtown.
Regular diners see the orange cones and the "Road Closed" signs and they just... go to West Des Moines instead.
The Real Cost of Being "Open"
The restaurants that remain are fighting a war on four fronts:
- Labor: Finding cooks who can afford to live near downtown is getting harder.
- Insurance: Premiums for downtown properties have skyrocketed.
- Food Costs: We all see the grocery bills; now imagine that scaled for a steakhouse.
- The "Ozempic Effect": This sounds like a conspiracy theory, but even the Iowa Restaurant Association CEO, Jessica Dunker, has noted it. With more people on GLP-1 medications, folks are eating out less and ordering smaller plates. Every 4% drop in customers matters when your profit margin is a razor-thin 3%.
Is the Western Gateway Dead?
It’s easy to get gloomy. Walking past the old Americana space and hearing it's being converted into offices feels a bit ironic, considering the lack of office workers is what helped kill the restaurant.
But it’s not all "Cthulhu and malevolence" (as one local Reddit thread joked).
The neighborhood is in a transition phase. We are moving away from a district that serves commuters and moving toward one that serves residents. More apartments are going up. The people living in those buildings don't want a "business lunch"; they want a late-night spot, a quick coffee, or a grocery-restaurant hybrid.
Places like Exile Brewing Co. and Gateway Market continue to hold the line because they've become destinations rather than just "places near the office."
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What Most People Miss About the Closures
We tend to blame the city or the economy, but sometimes it’s just the natural lifecycle of a restaurant. Fourteen years is an eternity in the food world. A lot of these spots opened when the Western Gateway was a brand-new frontier. Now, the frontier has moved, or at least, the map has been redrawn.
The "vibrancy" the owners wanted to bring in 2011 is still there, but it’s becoming more fragmented. You see it in the rise of smaller, more nimble "micro-concepts" rather than 5,000-square-foot dining rooms that are impossible to fill on a Wednesday night.
Actionable Insights: How to Navigate the New Downtown
If you’re worried about your favorite spot being the next headline, here is what you can actually do:
- Support Mid-Week: Don't just go out on Saturday night. If you can, grab lunch on a Wednesday or hit a Happy Hour on Tuesday. That is when these businesses are actually bleeding.
- Park Once and Walk: Don't let the street closures scare you. Use the parking garages on 9th or 12th Street. Once you're on foot, the "fortress" of festivals is actually pretty easy to navigate.
- Watch the "Resident-First" Spots: Keep an eye on the new, smaller tenants moving into the ground floors of apartment buildings. These are the businesses built for the "New Des Moines."
- Check the Map: Before heading out, check the Downtown DSM events calendar. If a street is closed for a 5k, just adjust your route rather than giving up on the district entirely.
The Western Gateway isn't disappearing, but the era of the "Grand Locust Power Lunch" is definitely in the rearview mirror. The restaurants that survive will be the ones that figure out how to feed the people who live there, not just the ones who work there.
Next Steps:
Keep a close watch on the redevelopment of the Americana space; while the upstairs is slated for offices, the street-level vibe will dictate if the 1300 block remains a destination or becomes a "dead zone." Additionally, check the status of the "Global Plaza" project near the Krause Gateway Center, which may eventually host the festivals that currently clog the streets, potentially giving the restaurants their weekend traffic back.