KHAK Announces the Winner of the ‘Favorite Restaurant’ Bracket

It's been a pretty intense couple of weeks in KHAK Country!

In case you somehow missed it, several weeks ago we decided to participate in all the basketball bracket madness by creating a bracket challenge of our own. Instead of sports, we went with something we are VERY passionate about... food!

Last year was year one of the KHAK Favorite Restaurant Bracket, where we had 16 Eastern Iowa restaurants go head-to-head to find out which was the favorite here in the Corridor. It was such a huge success that we decided to bring it back again this year!

All sixteen restaurants chosen for the bracket were 100% chosen by you, the listener, on our Facebook page back at the beginning of March, simply based on the number of nominations. I know this because I personally spent about an hour counting up over 400 votes! Restaurants couldn't buy their way in, and they weren't chosen based on advertising dollars or how much the KHAK crew liked them. In fact, we had never even heard of some of this year's challengers, and that's what we love most about it!

After several weeks of voting by passionate supporters of local Iowa businesses, we finally have our champion. It all came down to two small town restaurants: Hale Tap in Hale and The Bread Basket in Manchester, and boy, did their customers show their support. This year's final poll had nearly 2,000 votes!

Without further ado, our 2017 winner, Bluff Lake Catfish Farm in Maquoketa will be passing the torch to...

HALE TAP in Hale, Iowa!

Jackie Mormann, the owner of The Bread Basket, and Matt Walshire and Steve Klein, the owners of Hale Tap, joined us in the studio for the big announcement this morning:

Thank you all SO, SO much for your votes and support of all of this year's amazing nominees! We're already looking forward to 2019 :)