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Wally’s Chowder House has been feeding Des Moines seafood, its world famous chowder, and towering plates of fried fish for decades, going all the way back to its earlier life as Moby Doug’s. It’s the kind of place where regulars have favorite tables and servers, some who have worked there for several decades and remember faces.

Now Wally’s has new owners, and they’ve been tinkering with the place.

Not turn-it-into-a-small-plates-concept tinkering. Nobody’s messing with the fish and chips.

Mostly, they’ve been fixing the building and equipment, upgrading things, and trying to make an old-school neighborhood restaurant work a little better (without changing what people liked about it in the first place).

First and perhaps most importantly: Wally’s finally has air conditioning.

Not only in the dining room and bar, but in the kitchen, which may be the single most popular management decision made there in years. Anyone who has worked a fryer station in August knows that kitchen AC isn’t exactly a frivolous perk.

On Sundays, the doors now open at 9:30 a.m., giving people enough time to order of the special Game Day menu, coffee, a Bloody Mary, or whatever else their particular relationship with the NFL requires before the 10 a.m. games kick off.

They’ll show Seahawks games, the Sunday slate, Sunday Night Football, Monday Night Football and Thursday Night Football, along with major college games.

The bar itself has gotten some attention too. The beer lineup has been expanded with more local drafts, bottles, cans and seltzers. There’s a revamped wine list and a deeper collection of top shelf whiskey, bourbon, Scotch, tequila and mezcal. The frozen beer towers have also been repaired, because beer is generally more successful when it arrives super cold.

The stated goal is pretty straightforward: be the best place in Des Moines to watch a game.

Meanwhile, the kitchen isn’t standing still.

The new ownership has been working on seafood sourcing, cooking oils and pricing, while adding a few things that would have seemed slightly out of character at the old Wally’s.

Beginning September 8, there’s a run of Cajun specials, including Cajun shrimp pasta, Cajun crab cakes and a Cajun-spiced beer batter available on the cod and prawns.

What hasn’t changed much is the staff.

That matters at a restaurant like Wally’s. A surprising number of the people taking orders, pouring drinks and working the kitchen have been there for years. New owner David Meinert and Hold Fast Hospitality say their operating philosophy is basically this: take care of the people who work there, and they’ll take care of the people who eat there.

That has meant adding or emphasizing things considerably less glamorous than Cajun crab cakes, including employee benefits, wages and better working conditions. Again, see: kitchen air conditioning.

There are other small improvements. The patio has new heaters and should remain usable much deeper into the year. Wally’s is also now open until 10 p.m. every day, which gives Des Moines a few more options when somebody develops a 9:15 p.m. craving for fried cod.

And plenty of the old stuff remains.

Monday still brings the all-you-can-eat cod medallions or fried prawns and chips. There are rotating fresh-sheet specials and happy hour that’s been expanded to the whole bar and patio so it can accommodate larger parties. And the chowder that built much of Wally’s reputation is still very much the same chowder.

That may ultimately be the smartest thing about the changes at Wally’s.

Nobody needed the place reinvented.

It just needed some attention, some investment, colder beer, later hours and, after all these years, air conditioning.

   

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