Eat Well Food Tour: Butler's Cafe & Coffee (Sioux Center, IA)

[Kirstin Vander Giessen-Reitsma]

As often happens with tours of this sort, we packed our schedule extremely full--too full, perhaps. So when a particular stop didn't work out during the second week of our big Midwest leg, it was actually quite a relief to sit down in a coffee shop for a few hours and catch up on blog posts.

When Rob and I attended Dordt College in 1997-1999, there wasn't really a great coffee shop in town. There was one that was okay, and there was a better one across the cornfields in Orange City, but we desired a good place close to home. Thankfully, now there's Butler's Café & Coffee.

We met with some folks at Butler's for an interview on Tuesday and Wednesday, we were there over the lunch hour(s) making use of their wi-fi and air conditioning. The staff was really friendly and the space was cool and welcoming, though with a gas fireplace, easily convertible to the warm welcome appropriate to Iowa winters. A huge bookshelf in the center of the space had probably a couple hundred volumes for lending. The lunch options were well made with whole, healthy ingredients, though the coffee could have been better. I don't think I would have chosen to locate in a strip mall, but in Sioux Center, even a strip mall is centrally located, making it easily walkable. All in all, Butler's was a great place to relax and work.