Build your pizzeria website in Des Moines, Iowa
Des Moines has been eating pizza longer than most of the Midwest, and its best pizzerias are family businesses with decades of regulars. A website of your own puts that history in front of the next generation of customers, and lets them order directly instead of through an app that takes a cut.
An early pizza town
Des Moines got its pizza from its Italian families. Most of the Italians who settled on the south side came from Calabria and Sicily, and their kitchens shaped the city’s restaurants. Noah Lacona opened Noah’s Ark on Ingersoll Avenue in the late 1940s, using his mother’s recipes, and it is often described as one of the oldest pizzerias in Iowa. It is still known for medium-crust pies heavy on mozzarella, and for its love knots.
By the early 1950s, La Pizza House, Chuck’s and Mama Lacona’s had opened around the city, and several of those rooms are still running. Since then, newer places have arrived in the East Village, the walkable district between the river and the State Capitol, and neighborhoods like Beaverdale and Highland Park keep their own local spots. Around them, every national chain fills the suburban strips.
History doesn’t fit in an app listing
On DoorDash or Uber Eats, a pizzeria with seventy years behind it is a thumbnail and a star rating, sitting next to a coupon deal from a chain. The story that made it worth driving across town for disappears. Your own site gives it room: who started the place, where the sausage comes from, what has stayed the same since your grandfather’s time.
It also keeps the business in the family. Your regulars, and their children who now live in the suburbs, can order directly without a delivery fee, and you keep the whole ticket. Sizes in inches, the Friday special, holiday hours, all in one place you control.
Office lunches, students and the fair
Des Moines is one of the country’s big insurance centers, home to Principal Financial Group and Wellmark among others, and downtown fills with office workers on weekdays. Team lunches are large, regular orders, and they are simpler through your own site: one order, a set time, one payment. Drake University, northwest of downtown, adds students who order late during the school year.
In August, the Iowa State Fair brings huge crowds to the east side, and visitors look for food on Google. A site with your address and hours is what they find.
Keep the apps if they help you reach new people. Make your website the place where Des Moines keeps ordering from the pizzeria it already loves.