Anson Thompson
Google
In the sweltering, corn-syrup haze of a Des Moines midday—September 18, 2025, etch it in the ledger of lost afternoons, for the flatland demons were howling—I careened into that fever-dream speakeasy called Mulberry Street Tavern, hunkered at 206 6th Ave like a banker’s ghost risen from the trolley tracks of yesteryear.  Five stars, you corn-fed heathens, five bloodshot stars ripped from the hide of the prairie sky, because to score it lower would be to spit in the eye of the open-hearth gods who stoke its fires. Kenny—yes, Kenny, that grinning apparition at the zinc bar, going by Lil Dicky in the shadowed hours when the whiskey whispers names—unleashed a soup and salad that struck like a combine harvester laced with lightning and holy water from the Raccoon River. The soup? A cauldron of primordial elixir, steaming with root vegetables that clawed their way from Iowa’s black earth, infused with herbs sharp as switchblades and a broth so rich it could bribe a senator or dissolve the chains of a bad divorce. And the salad! Mother of mercy, the salad—a riot of greens plucked from forbidden truck-farm patches, crisp as the crack of a .38 in a cornfield ambush, tossed in a dressing of vinaigrette that sang of elderberry sins and the tears of ambitious cicadas. It wasn’t mere sustenance; it was a ritual gut-punch, a chlorophyll-fueled exorcism for every mile of monotonous interstate that led me here, belly full of regret and radiator fluid.
But the mixed drinks, oh you sons of the soil, the mixed drinks were the real heart-attack revelation, sorcerer’s brews muddled in shakers of hammered tin by Kenny’s callused, clairvoyant mitts. One gulp of that rye-fueled monstrosity—dub it the “Trolley Phantom,” why not?—and I was airborne over the Des Moines skyline, hallucinations of top-hatted tycoons waltzing with feral hogs, the ice rattling like loose change in a politician’s pocket during a filibuster. Another, a vodka vortex with bitters bitter as a betrayed harvest and a lemon twist that seized the sinuses like a twister in July, hurled me into paroxysms of cackling hysteria that bounced off the leather-upholstered walls, where mounted antlers from long-dead bucks judged me with eyes like boiled marbles. These weren’t libations; they were mutagens, man, chemical grenades lobbed into the trenches of temperance, exploding into visions of endless amber waves under a blood-orange moon.
I lurched out into the muggy gale, tab settled but psyche swollen with the riot of it all, swearing a blood oath to this agribusiness Atlantis amid the feedlots and fairgrounds. Five stars? Christ, I’d mortgage the family silo for more. Kenny, you outlaw alchemist, keep ladling that lunacy—Lil Dicky’s saga swells with every shaken drop.