Iowa restaurants got a big win on Friday!

A new article from KCRG reports that last week on July 1st, a new law went into effect that puts restrictions on third party delivery services, such as DoorDash, Uber Eats, and GrubHub. The law says that these delivery services can no longer represent a restaurant with their logo or menu without having a contract, and if they don't abide by the rules, there will be a fine. The first offense will cost the service $1,000 and the third offense will cost them $10,000. In addition, the law also prohibits drivers from smoking/vaping and delivering food with kids or pets in the car with them. A February article from the Des Moines Register said that the proposed legislation came about after the pandemic caused a surge in food delivery.

So, why is this good news? According to the proposed Food Delivery Protection Act, 40% of restaurants have had a third party delivery service represent themselves as a partner of their restaurant without their permission, 92% want 3rd party delivery services to assume liability for food safety and driver behavior, and 88% would like rules prohibiting smoking, passengers, and animals in delivery vehicles. If something goes wrong between the time the food is picked up and the time it is delivered, restaurants are sometimes unnecessarily blamed for those mishaps, which can hurt their reputation. The owner of Bop's Pizza in Cedar Rapids told KCRG, "If it gets cold or damaged, my name is on the box. They’re going to think of me.”

You can read more about the new law that went into effect on Friday HERE.

New Restaurants That Opened in Eastern Iowa in 2022

The next time you're looking for a new place to go eat, you might want to check out this list! A ton of new restaurants opened in the Cedar Rapids area in 2022, with even more on the way in early 2023. Here are the places that began welcoming customers in 2022:

Gallery Credit: Courtlin

The Top-Rated Restaurants in Marion & Hiawatha

As a way to highlight some of the restaurants just outside of Cedar Rapids, we turned to Yelp to figure out the highest-rated restaurants in Marion and Hiawatha. In order to be added to the list, the official address of the business had to be in one of those two cities. Here are the top ten!

Gallery Credit: Courtlin

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