Stella’s brings a slice of Iowa to Grand Junction
Stella’s Brings a Slice of Iowa to Grand Junction By Kalen McCain, The Daily Sentinel – October 28, 2025
The front door to Grand Junction’s newest restaurant is, to the senses, a portal into small-town Iowa.
Every detail is carefully curated, down to the make of the tables and mismatched chairs, the wear of the wooden floors and the shade of green on the siding, some of which faces inward on an all-seasons porch. Even the wall décor — including Grant Wood paintings, Iowa Hawkeye memorabilia, and Saturday Evening Post covers — comes straight from the heartland.
Stella’s Fried Pork Tenderloins co-owners Mike Button and Chef Tyler Polley said they’ve gone to great lengths to embody their nostalgia for their shared home state.
“I wanted it to look like a Midwest home, hence the siding and the four-season porch,” Button said. “I’m super happy with how it turned out. I think it resembles that Midwest look, and that’s what I wanted. I wanted people to be comfortable, and I wanted them to feel like they’re at home — like they’re at a nice, welcoming home.”
At the top of the breakfast and lunch spot’s menu is a sandwich held in high regard by the co-owners: a pork tenderloin, with meat sourced directly from Iowa.
Featuring a generous cut of pork loin hand-tenderized with a mallet, brined overnight, and covered in homemade batter and breading before a trip through a fryer, the dish is a staple of Iowa dining — easily found on the menus of countless blue-collar restaurants, fairground booths, and truck stops in the Corn Belt.
A thousand miles away, however, it’s almost impossible to find a good one on the West Slope.
That gap in the market led Button and Polley to open Stella’s Fried Pork Tenderloins several years ago, as a small business operating from the leased-out kitchen of The Brass Rail, where they served bar patrons through a pick-up window.
Their new location at 811 S. Seventh St. represents not only a move to a larger kitchen, but the long-awaited opening of a standalone dining room exclusively for Stella’s customers. And while the restaurant will serve numerous staples of casual Midwestern cuisine in its new digs, Button said the tenderloin would remain a specialty.
“When you’re from the Midwest, you grow up on them. You know what a fried pork tenderloin is from when you’re a little kid,” he said. “It’s a dish that I’ve always liked. It reminded me of being a kid in Iowa… and we look for items that really bring that nostalgia out in people.”
While not every customer will grasp the sandwich’s cultural importance, he expects most to at least appreciate the taste.
“You know, they’re a good sandwich that a lot of people don’t know out here, and we think they’d like it,” Button said. “It’s not a hard sell, I’ve found, but we do spend a lot of time explaining what, exactly, it is to people who aren’t familiar with it.”
The new business model comes with new challenges: the co-owners said they had to hire and train staff, now that they have a fully functional dining room instead of a simple serving window.
But the addition of a breakfast menu and earlier hours hasn’t changed the duo’s focus on comfort food classics, nor has it compromised their approach to preparing them.
“I don’t think a lot of restaurants tap into that nostalgia very much. I think they’re always looking for the new thing, and there’s a lot of dishes that are great that are old things,” Button said. “I don’t want a fried pork tenderloin with a new twist. I want the fried pork tenderloin that I grew up with.”
Although most employees lack the owners’ Iowa-specific experiences, Polley — who is also the establishment’s executive chef — said his fellow cooks were dedicated to getting the dishes right every time, and shared his dedication to authenticity.
“I believe I’ve instilled the passion, and they came in with the passion, to do things right,” he said. “I’m not freaking out about it at all. My chefs back there are asking questions, I’m answering those questions, and they’re executing so wonderfully.”
Another obstacle for the new building was renovating it. Converting the property from a vacant business to a welcoming dining room took about nine months, as the co-owners did whatever in-house physical labor they could and hired contractors for the rest. While Button and Polley have experience opening restaurants for others, the two said they’d never had to personally handle so much of the groundwork.
Button said it was also financially enlightening to go through the process as an owner, rather than a manager.
“It’s different, when it’s your money on the line. There’s different pressures, that’s for sure!” he said. “I’m now understanding why my previous owner would yell at me about certain things — overtime and things like that… I lie awake at night a lot more.”
Stella’s Fried Pork Tenderloins officially opened on October 27. They spent the week prior running through a handful of soft openings, taking reservations to give new employees a more-or-less controlled test run.
A few logistical hiccups aside, Polley said the team quickly found its rhythm.
“We intentionally created chaos back there to see reactions, and we all strived through them and learned from our mistakes,” he said. “They’ve all been very good about learning… our first, largest ticket was a 38-minute ticket. We’ve trimmed that down by 10 minutes.”
“Stella,” the co-owners note, is not a partner in the business venture. Nor is she a person.
The restaurant is named after a golden hawk with the same moniker, who became the University of Iowa rugby team’s unofficial mascot during Button and Polley’s time there, when she could be spotted at most home games and practices.
Since the co-owners’ tenure on the team, many players have opted to have Stella’s name printed on their jerseys rather than their own. It’s a tradition Button and Polley have continued with the employee uniforms at the restaurant in Grand Junction.
“We would start games and end games with, ‘Hands in on me, Stella on three,’” Button said. “Even today, if I talk to the guys on social media, or text them, everything ends with, ‘Stella.’”
