Drake University Guide: Where to Eat, Drink & Stay in Des Moines (2026)

Whether you're a Drake student still working out your regular spots, an incoming Bulldog learning Des Moines, a parent driving in for move-in, an alum back for the Relays, or a prospective student walking campus for the first time, this guide pulls together the restaurants, cafes, bars, hotels, and campus landmarks worth knowing around Drake University.

Drake sits on 150 acres a few minutes northwest of downtown Des Moines, in a neighborhood everyone calls Dogtown, after the bulldog. That name does a lot of work in this guide. The commercial strip at 25th and University Avenue is the part of the city you can actually walk to from a residence hall, and it holds the diner, the pizza counter, the study cafe, and the bar every Drake student ends up in. Everything else sorts into three short drives: Ingersoll Avenue to the south for the sit-down dinners, Sherman Hill in between for the brewery, and downtown and the East Village to the east for the hotels and the bigger nights out. The calendar matters too. Move-in lands in mid-August, commencement is a Knapp Center weekend in May, and the Drake Relays take over the last week of April every year. Everything below is organized to help you find what you need quickly, whatever brings you to town.

Des Moines has quietly become a good food city, but the places Drake students rotate through are a narrow subset, and almost all of them sit on one stretch of University Avenue. The diner that has fed the neighborhood since 1987, the slice counter across the street, the burger bar with the summer patio: that's the daily rotation, and it's genuinely walkable. The better dinners are a short drive south on Ingersoll or east into downtown, which is where parents weekend and graduation reservations tend to land. The list below runs from campus outward.

There's one real coffee shop in the Drake neighborhood and it's a good one, which simplifies the daily decision considerably. The rest of this list is a short drive, spread across Sherman Hill, downtown's West End, and Ingersoll, and it's worth knowing that Des Moines has a genuinely serious specialty coffee scene for a city its size. Two of the shops below roast their own. The list runs from campus outward.

Drake's drinking geography is unusually easy to learn, because two of the three bars that matter most are within a few blocks of campus on Forest Avenue. Peggy's is the institution, the one every alum brings up first, and Relays week is when it takes over the neighborhood entirely with a tent out front. The Library, a block off campus on University, is the one that works for parents as much as students. Everything else is downtown or in the East Village, where the arcade bar, the British pub, and the tiki room live. The list runs from campus outward.

The short version for anyone asking you where to book: one hotel is genuinely at Drake, and everything else is a short drive. Home2 Suites sits across the street from campus, which makes it the obvious first call for move-in or graduation. After that the choice is really about what kind of weekend you want, because downtown Des Moines is about eight minutes away and puts you inside walking distance of most of the dinners in this guide. Relays week brings tens of thousands of people to the neighborhood over four days and closes Forest Avenue, so book well ahead and expect to leave extra time getting around.

Drake's campus is small, flat, and easy to walk end to end, which makes it one of the more pleasant campus tours in the Midwest. The core sits along University Avenue and Carpenter Avenue, and you can see almost everything below in an hour on foot. Two practical notes before you arrive. First, parking is not free: every vehicle on campus needs a permit, visitors pay through the ParkDsm app at the designated lots at 25th and Carpenter and University and 29th, and admission visitors park in Lot 16 by the Olmsted Center. The exception is commencement day, when any Drake lot is free. Second, the Office of Admission is in Cole Hall at 2507 University Ave, and individual visits include a tour plus a meeting with a counselor.