Fresko

Fresko is a Mediterranean restaurant on Ingersoll Avenue, and it is in this guide for two drinks that between them cover a gap most venues never think about.

The Blackberry Mocktail is the conventional one and it is well built: a spiced blackberry and rose simple syrup, lime juice, and Fever Tree sparkling pink grapefruit. Rose and blackberry is a classic pairing, the spice keeps it from being merely floral, and the grapefruit tonic adds the bitterness that stops a berry drink turning into cordial.

The Chai Mocktail is the interesting one. Chai tea, cola syrup and vanilla ice cream is, functionally, a spiced float — and it is a dessert drink rather than an aperitif. That category barely exists in alcohol-free drinking, and its absence is a real gap. After a meal, everyone else at the table orders a digestif, an amaro, a dessert wine, a whisky. The non-drinker gets coffee or nothing, which is the second time in one evening that the ritual excludes them. A restaurant that has built something to occupy that slot has thought further ahead than almost anywhere else in this directory.

Both drinks were documented by Des Moines' tourism board in January 2026.

The hours are the other virtue: 11am to 9pm Monday through Thursday, to 10:30pm on Friday, and a weekend service from 10am — seven days a week with no closed day, in a city where the better cocktail rooms are shut on Sunday, Monday or both. It sits on the same Ingersoll stretch as The Bartender's Handshake and Eatery A, which makes that corridor the most reliable part of Des Moines for a non-drinker who has not planned ahead.