Home > Des Moines Restaurants > Editorial Review > Editorial Juice Review: Raccoon River Brewing Company

When the office was trying to decide where to hold a combination party � a goodbye party and three Happy Birthdays � we ultimately ended up at Raccoon River Brewing Company. Brew pubs like Raccoon River are good places to go when you need to please a crowd. Although most of the gut-busting entrees are more than $10, you can find plenty of amazing, cheap eats among the pizza, appetizers and salad menus. The beer's also good, and the wine is . . . yeah. We'll get to that.

THE GOOD

We split an order of the Southwestern chicken eggrolls and the Mediterranean pizza. The pizza is nontraditional. Instead of tomato sauce, its roasted red pepper pine nut pesto base is topped with roasted garlic, sundried tomatoes, artichoke hearts and goat cheese. We decided the pizza with its fresh crust that's made in-house was even better than pizzas we've had at Centro. (The same company manages both restaurants.) The eggrolls were pretty good. You get four pieces, which was enough for us. On another visit, we tried the Homestead Red beer. I'm generally not a big fan of beer, but liked this a lot.

THE BAD

We ordered pizza one night and waited and waited for it to appear. Our friendly server came over to tell us that the kitchen had a mini-emergency. The pizza maker had to go to the hospital, and the stand-in had burned our crust. She offered us free drinks while they were making us a new pizza. Unfortunately we were in the mood for wine. We should have known better as we scanned the list and saw it filled with cheap-tasting wines. Still, we each ordered a glass and were disappointed that the wine was indeed foul. This shouldn't be happening, especially given the great selection at Forty Three right next door. Yeah, I know it's a brew pub, but I'd have thought a manager would have figured out that sometimes customers are going to order wine and don't want it to taste cheap. Also unfortunate: no pizza on the lunch menu, and smoking on the entire upper flower and lower bar area.

BOTTOM LINE

A nice mix of pub food, well-designed pizzas and salads. Just remember to order the beer, not the wine. Duh.

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