Restaurants in Des Moines, IA

Des Moines has 978 places in this guide, with 631 restaurants among them. Quick service accounts for 78, cafes for 86 and bars for 174. Bars (167), Mexican (97) and coffee shops and cafes (89) are the three largest categories among the listed places.

Des Moines' 45.9 places per ten thousand residents sit above the 41.8 median across all cities.

711 listings are independent; the chains that show up most are Starbucks (17), Subway (15), Casey's (14) and McDonald's (14).

In the Servestack Independent Restaurant Index, Des Moines ranks #73 of 332 large US cities for the share of places that are independent.

Food in Des Moines by cuisine

Own a restaurant in Des Moines?

859 of the 978 places here (88%) list a website. When a guest searches for food in Des Moines and lands on a delivery app instead of your site, the app takes a commission on the order and shows them your competitors. Servestack gives you your own ordering site with zero commission, POS sync and loyalty, and Studio makes the menus, flyers and posts to promote it. See what you would keep with the commission savings calculator, or browse the restaurant marketing guides.

Place data from the Overture Maps Foundation (overturemaps.org), which includes data from Meta, Microsoft and Foursquare, used under the CDLA Permissive 2.0 and Apache 2.0 licenses. Restaurants open, close and move; check with the restaurant before you go. Data refreshed 2026-10-11.