Restaurant Good Fellows 501 aims to be best between Des Moines, Omaha

Found in the smaller southwest Iowa city of Woodbine, Great Fellows 501 is a story of second prospects.

To start with: the creating.

The Odd Fellows Developing in downtown Woodbine served as the lodge for the Inside Order of Odd Fellows, a fraternal organization that originated in 1806 and became the world’s greatest fraternal organization by the finish of the 19th century, reporting extra than 2.7 million associates in the 1920s. Due to the fact then, the business, like a lot of fraternal organizations, has expert a drop and now claims 600,000 associates throughout the globe. 

Todd Waite, founder, co-operator and normal manager, was 1 of a group of men and women who renovated the 19th-century lodge into a cafe that opened in 2015. Even so, it was not the cafe that is open up these days. This is the second “second possibility.” 

This second opportunity began soon after the initially restaurant’s premature closing just two years after it opened. “Our workforce that had labored so hard and achieved so substantially scattered in distinct directions,” mentioned Waite. “For a time, it seemed that would be the conclude of the story–a fading memory of a cafe household haunted by the most unsettling of issues: ‘What may have been?’”