Iowa’s most unusual restaurants prove that endearing weirdness is not limited to major coastal cities. Like the restaurants featured among Wyoming’s five weirdest dining destinations, these places turn local history and highly specific obsessions into memorable meals.
The result includes wrestling-themed burgers, zombie burgers, tiki cocktails and a restaurant hidden beneath a parking ramp.
The Flying Elbow in Marshalltown
The Flying Elbow combines professional wrestling and comfort food with the enthusiasm of a fan who has never considered turning down the television.
Wrestling memorabilia fills the restaurant, while menu items borrow names from famous performers, catchphrases and finishing moves. Customers can order creations such as the Nature Boy, the 3:16 or the Razor’s Edge rather than settling for a conventionally named burger.
The restaurant’s food has earned attention beyond the novelty. The Flying Elbow won the Iowa Beef Industry Council’s Best Burger in Iowa contest in 2022, demonstrating that the kitchen takes its burgers as seriously as it takes professional wrestling.
It is difficult to decide whether the championship belt belongs to the cooks or the menu.
Zombie Burger + Drink Lab in Des Moines
Zombie Burger imagines what might happen if a burger restaurant survived the end of civilization and decided to decorate with the creatures responsible for it.
The Des Moines restaurant, part of celebrated chef George Formaro’s local restaurant group, features zombie artwork, gruesome posters and life-sized undead figures. Burgers have horror-themed names like the Walking Ched, while towering milkshakes frequently look elaborate enough to require their own structural engineering review.
Despite the intentionally gory atmosphere, Zombie Burger is more playful than frightening. Families, tourists and devoted burger fans dine beneath the watchful eyes of the undead without appearing particularly concerned about becoming dessert.
It is a zombie apocalypse where the greatest danger may be ordering a huge burger and an equally enormous shake at the same meal.
Fong’s Pizza in Des Moines
Fong’s Pizza answers a question few people thought to ask: What would happen if a Chinese restaurant, a pizzeria and a tiki bar became the same business?
The menu combines Asian and Italian-American ideas in creations such as crab rangoon pizza and its signature Fong’s Combo. Tropical drinks, tiki mugs and playful decorations add another seemingly unrelated influence. Fong’s opened in 2009 in a downtown Des Moines building that had housed the King Ying Low Chinese restaurant for nearly a century, and it preserved elements of that history.
Its East Village location features an enormous dragon that once decorated another Des Moines restaurant, along with Chinese-style roof tiles and a wraparound bar that help create an environment as cheerfully mixed-up as the menu.
Fong’s should feel confused. Instead, its collection of unlikely influences has become one of Des Moines’ most recognizable dining experiences.
Canteen Lunch in the Alley in Ottumwa
Canteen Lunch in the Alley is easy to miss, which is part of its charm.
The tiny Ottumwa restaurant at 112 E. 2nd Street is tucked beneath a downtown parking ramp and centers almost entirely on a horseshoe-shaped counter with roughly 16 stools. Customers sit shoulder to shoulder and order the restaurant’s signature loose-meat sandwiches — known locally as “canteens” — along with homemade pie, shakes and other simple accompaniments. The Canteen has operated since 1927 and moved to its current spot under the parking ramp in 1936.
The restaurant’s unusual setting has become inseparable from the experience. It also helped inspire the fictional Lanford Lunch Box featured on the television series “Roseanne” — a connection that traces to Ottumwa native Tom Arnold, Roseanne Barr’s husband during the show’s run, who grew up eating loose-meats and pie there.
Many restaurants hope for spacious dining rooms and highly visible locations. The Canteen became beloved by doing almost the exact opposite.
Iowa 80 Kitchen in Walcott
Iowa 80 Kitchen is located inside the self-proclaimed World’s Largest Truckstop, a place so large that calling it a gas station seems almost disrespectful.
The Iowa 80 complex, which opened in 1964 just off Interstate 80, includes hundreds of truck parking spaces, stores, services, a movie theater, a dentist, a barbershop and a truck museum. Drivers can address needs ranging from dinner and dental care to laundry and vehicle accessories without leaving the property.
At the center is a large, family-owned restaurant serving travelers around the clock. The dining room seats hundreds, and the Iowa 80 Kitchen’s country-style buffet — the “Super Truckstop Buffet” — matches the scale of nearly everything surrounding it.
Iowa 80 is endearingly weird because it transforms a roadside stop into a small city devoted to people and machines that spend their lives on the highway.
Iowa gives its quirks room to grow
These restaurants are not weird merely because someone added unusual decorations.
They reflect real local passions: professional wrestling in Marshalltown, generations of lunch-counter tradition in Ottumwa and Iowa’s central place in America’s trucking industry.
Even the zombies and tiki drinks feel at home because the restaurants embrace them so completely.
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