If you Google “best restaurants in Des Moines,” you’ll be hard-pressed to find a list that doesn’t include Harbinger. The vegetable-forward, small-plate restaurant co-owned by husband-and-wife duo Joe and Alex Tripp has been a fine dining destination since it opened in 2017.
In 2022, the duo opened Windsor Heights’ Little Brother, a breakfast-centric joint with a menu inspired by Joe’s Jewish upbringing. This January, the Tripps opened their third restaurant, Basic Bird, chef-driven, fast and focused on one thing: Korean fried chicken. Oh, and it’s gluten free.
I sat down with Joe at the end of January to talk about the opening of Basic Bird, his goals for this new venture and why he sources as many ingredients locally as possible. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What got you into cooking in the first place?
I graduated in 2008 from the University of Iowa with a degree in psychology and philosophy, and there wasn’t much of a job market. I started cooking just to pass the time between grad school, and I never left the kitchen. So I graduated from Iowa, started cooking in kitchens, moved out to Denver and cooked for Alex Seidel at Fruition Restaurant for about five years. It’s been kind of nonstop since then.
You’ve been nominated five times for Best Chef Midwest at the James Beard Awards. What does it feel like being nominated that many times?
I feel good. I’d love to move to the next level at some point. There’s a lot of great chefs in the state of Iowa, and we’ve never advanced anyone to the next round. That’s a real shame.
I don’t really do much of the chefing these days. I’ve got Ryan Skinner who runs my restaurant at Harbinger. He’s doing everything over there. If anybody gets a James Beard nod these days, it would be him. He’s definitely deserving of one. But [being nominated was] definitely an honor and a good kickstart to my career. Now I’m looking into the world of being a restaurateur more than just the chef.
Basic Bird was born out of COVID. Why did you decide to make it a permanent thing?
Harbinger’s my baby. I’m very proud of what we’ve built there and what they continue to achieve there, but in the end it’s a chef-driven restaurant. It’s not the most sustainable thing for me as a dad. [Before COVID, Alex and I] had started looking at this idea of chef-driven fast food and why these kinds of places had to be any different than the types of restaurants we already owned. We saw a lot of success in business models that just focused on one thing, and we knew we wanted to fry chicken. We had done quite a bit of traveling and ate quite a bit of Korean fried chicken. I actually had some of the sauce for it from one of my original kitchen jobs — it was shared by a grandma I knew.
COVID seemed like a good opportunity to try it out. We had the staff, we went for it, and it was an immediate success. It let us keep almost all my staff on board throughout the entirety of the pandemic. Most of them still work with me. A huge part of our success is keeping people around and keeping them happy at their job, and all of that is largely due to Basic Bird.
Basic Bird just opened at the beginning of January. How’s it going so far?
It was a rough start with a lot of weather issues. That threw quite a few curveballs at us. We’re on week three. We’re going to easily be able to operate for the entirety of the week, which was our goal. Next week we plan on offering online ordering. It’s baby steps, but I see a lot of growth potential. I’m really excited for what the future holds.
I hope to open a couple of these. Iowa City is in my sight. I went to school there, I’m familiar with it, and I would love to see one of these open up there. Hopefully you can get some gluten-free chicken there at some point soon.
Harbinger focuses mostly on vegetable dishes, and Basic Bird is gluten free and has a vegan option. Why is it important to you to offer menu items for different diets?
I’ll be honest with you that the gluten free thing is a blessing because a lot of people are looking for it these days, [but] we didn’t create Basic Bird to be gluten free. It just happens to be how I knew how to make Korean fried chicken. It uses potato starch and cornstarch plus a couple other secret ingredients that all happen to be gluten free. Then it was just a matter of sourcing a couple of gluten-free soy sauce substitutes and things of that sort once we realized that people really wanted that option.
As far as the vegetables go, from a business model, meat is expensive. Vegetables are delicious. When we opened Harbinger, it seemed like a new way to introduce flavors to people. So we’ve always been vegetable focused over there. There’s only so many ways a piece of beef can taste different, but the world of vegetables is pretty vast.
Harbinger focuses on supporting local farmers and getting food from farmers markets. Why is that important to you?
[We want to serve] great food. Usually great food comes from great farms. One of the things I was taught growing up in kitchens and learning from chefs like Alex Seidel was that if you just do your job and start with good product and respect the product, then your job’s pretty easy. So Harbinger starts with great product because we want to be the best, and that just happens to come from local farmers and the connections we make with them.
Do you do that at the other restaurants, too?
Basic Bird, not so much yet because of the season. But we intend all our vegetables to be sourced locally once we get into the growing season as much as possible. Little Brother, absolutely. All our eggs and our meat products are made in house, and use Iowa-raised pork, chickens, all that. Our eggs are farm-raised. We work with Farm Table Delivery for a lot of our product.
The menus at Little Brother and Harbinger change. How do you decide on your menu items?
Harbinger’s menu changes based on the connections we have with the farmers. We go to farmers markets, and they swing by the restaurant. Our job is to pick out what looks good and highlight that, so that menu changes very frequently during summer. A lot of times a dish is only on for a week or two. Sometimes that’s all you get for a season, especially for some of our favorite ingredients.
Little Brother changes less frequently. You’ll probably see quarterly changes as far as seasonal pancakes and that kind of thing. But for the most part, that menu is a lot more consistent. [At Basic Bird] I plan on offering special flavors of the month for chicken sauces and stuff like that. So there’ll be changes but for the most part the menu is built to be replicated and will always be the same.
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
I’ve always been about supporting the people who support us, and that’s really what’s gotten us through this. Basic Bird was great during the pandemic because it allowed some really great people to stay with us. It’s those great people who continue to run Harbinger and who run Little Brother that allow us to grow and do what we’re doing at Basic Bird. If it weren’t for them, we wouldn’t be anywhere. It’s all about the team.
A shorter version of this article was originally published in Little Village’s February 2024 issue.
