Gems: Café con Leche
Easiest Breakfast in Des Moines
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Not Your Influencer’s Brunch
Sunday brunch is not my scene. Long waits in restaurants overcrowded with influencers and fresh-from-church families . . . it’s all not for me. If I leave the house on Sunday at all, I want whatever I’m eating to be:
worth putting on a bra,
at a place with reasonable decibel levels, and
reliable.
This is why I love Café con Leche.
Uncommon Goods has a whole section for kitchen and bar wares! Foodies, enjoy! (affiliate link)
What Café con Leche Is and Isn’t
Selfishly, I hesitate to write about Café con Leche. When we went on a Saturday morning in spring, there was no wait. In four visits, there’s never been a wait.
It’s not that the space can seat hundreds. It’s quite small. Instead, Café con Leche flies under the radar of the stereotypical brunch-loving crowd.
Sadly, some reasons for this fall under frustrating systemic problems, and we need to have that conversation in depth another day.
Location
Café con Leche is on the Eastside. At the risk of offending nearly everyone, the Eastside is rarely sought after for Instagrammable food. The Venn Diagram of brunch influencers and people who love the Eastside of DSM has almost no overlap. Probably.
Our Eastside is not shiny. It is not gentrified. It is not teeming with eateries with eye-catching branding and cute names for alcoholic beverages.
In that sense, Café con Leche fits in with its neighborhood. It’s housed in an old fast-food eatery and resides at an intersection with an auto repair shop, aging strip malls, and a local Italian restaurant that’s older than me.
This lack of popularity is a result of an economic class divide that perpetuates dumb prejudices. I still struggle with these prejudices, even though I know better. It’s what motivates me to visit and write about overlooked eateries.
Any guesses what this building used to be?
Next, Café con Leche’s owner is a woman of color. To be clear, the brunch influencer crowd isn’t discriminatory by nature. Such biases—conscious or otherwise—are the sad products of sociological nurturing. We learn that shit. Again, that systemic divide usually puts businesses owned by people of color on the so-called wrong side of town.
I could provide countless evidence and anecdotes to demonstrate this point, but this one always comes to mind first. In my college teaching days, I recall proposing an outing to my West Des Moines students. When I mentioned the location of where I thought we should go, I got blank stares. It was in Pleasant Hill, which was like Montana to them. Several of them said they never went past 63rd Street because anything east of that was “scary.”
Affiliate break! Get $20 off if you spend $59 on your first order from Nuts.com! That may or may not have been commentary on said college-student mentality.
Also, it’s supposedly foreign. What I mean is that the menu contains dishes some of our more sheltered residents might run away from because they don’t recognize the names: chilaquiles, mollete, conchas, and licuados. If you asked me to tell you what those things are off the top of my head, I’d be like . . . I know what conchas are, and I could pretend to know the rest. But I’d be googling as well.
Lastly, it doesn’t match any fashionable aesthetic trend. The interior has loving touches like patterned tablecloths, a yellow neon sign with the eatery’s name, retro booths, and gorgeous mosaic tiles along the counter. But it’s not dripping with, well, drip. There aren’t flowery murals on the wall with trite sayings. There aren’t succulents in geometric planters over the tables. You won’t get IKEA lighting or Pottery Barn seating. (Are those things still considered cool? I’ve got no clue.)
Café con Leche is simple, lovely, and cozy.
During one of our meals, I think the owner’s entire family was there for a birthday party. It was goddamn delightful! That’s when I realized dining at Café con Leche was like eating at someone’s house. It’s charming, it’s not out to be something it isn’t, and there’s a good chance you’re sitting next to a cousin.
Café con Leche fits my criteria for a gem: It’s unique, genuine, and locally owned. It’s got the details that make it endearing. The result? Homegrown Kitchen has a 70-minute wait on weekends while we’re already finished chowing down at Café con Leche. (No hate to Homegrown. I don’t have the patience, though.)
How, then, is the food?