How it All Began

In February 2020, the Des Moines Register updated and re-circulated its 2018 comprehensive guide to The Essential Pizza Restaurants of Des Moines.  Upon review, it occurred to me that I had only indulged in about 30% or less of these restaurants.

Something had to change.  

We eat pizza about once a week, but here are all these pizza places that I've never even tried?  Unacceptable!

We have some staples in our house (like Gusto, Marco's, Cosi Cucina, Eatery A -- to name a few).  And those staples will forever hold a pizza my heart (see what I did there?), but this seemed like a great opportunity to branch out and really get a slice (I have to run out of these soon, right?) of what all these hard-working restaurants in Des Moines have to offer.

Right now is a great time to start, because I'm on a brief hiatus from grad school.  After two months of too-much-free time since the hiatus started, I'm ready to take on a new project. And I'm pretty excited to share it with you all.

The Plan

Using the Register list as a baseline, I pulled together a list of all the area pizza places we haven't tried.  I am going to organize the list by neighborhood/part of town, type of pizza, and eventually add ratings to the list too.  The most challenging part is probably just going to be getting out of our bubble and into other areas in Dough Des Moines.  

Once we've made our way through all 38 pizza joints on this list, we'll probably circle back to the rest of the spots on the list that we'd had before and get them ranked and filed here as well.  But we had to start somewhere. 

View the list here at any time. 

The Ratings 

We'll keep this on a simple 5-star rating scale.  Knowing that our preferences vary a bit, the ratings are bound to get biased, but that's why I started this blog so we can share in more detail about the crust, the toppings, the atmosphere, and other offerings.  

We got started right away.  Literally the same day we decided to do this.  Can't wait to share this with you all.

Saluti!

PS -- I'll finish grad school eventually, so don't give me any grief.