The Iowa City ramen shop and cocktail lounge Paper Crane was named one of the “Best of the Midwest” by the magazine Midwest Living, one of only 13 restaurants and the only recipient from Iowa, on March 17.
Paper Crane was first opened in October 2024 by Sam and Riene Gelman, the co-owners of the Iowa City restaurant, The Webster.
Located at 121 N. Linn St., Paper Crane sits just across the street from Gelman’s other establishment, The Webster. While The Webster serves high-end American cuisine, Paper Crane offers a casual, Japanese-inspired dining experience.
“The dining room gets the details right with origami-inspired design, charred Shou Sugi Ban wood, and teal accents, while a separate cocktail lounge pours sophisticated drinks alongside izakaya small plates,” Midwest Living’s review said. “It’s intimate without being precious, serious about technique without overthinking it.”
The Webster, which opened in May 2021, has also received national acclaim, having been the sole Iowa restaurant to make The New York Times’ 2023 restaurant list.
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Jodie McLennan, a graduate student at the University of Iowa, has visited Paper Crane in the past, both in the formal cocktail lounge and the more casual dining space.
“It’s a very cozy environment,” McLennan said. “I’ve been in the back, the lounge space, that was curtained off. It’s a completely different vibe. It’s a fun place to go with friends for drinks, and they had really interesting cocktails.”
The restaurant is split between a casual ramen bar and a formal cocktail lounge. Sam Gelman said he hoped to offer a unique dining experience to the community, catered toward older residents of Iowa City.
“We had initially wanted to have a more adult-oriented cocktail lounge that wasn’t a Big 10 University bar, which there are plenty of in the city already,” Gelman said. “We wanted to kind of track a little different clientele.”
One of The Webster’s chefs, Edwin Lee, proposed the idea for Paper Crane following a series of successful ramen pop-ups at The Webster, Sam Gelman said. Lee now works as the head chef of Paper Crane, running the day-to-day operations of the restaurant.
Sam Gelman said while the restaurant and the team behind it are not in the business for recognition and awards, it is still valuable to receive credit and validation for the work that they do.
“Restaurants are a tough business, tough to open and tough to sustain,” Sam Gelman said. “Everyone, especially the management team and everyone involved, all the employees, work really hard. So it’s a nice surprise to see us on these lists like this.”