Where to Eat on El Paseo and at The Gardens

Palm Desert

A shopping street that eats well

El Paseo is Palm Desert's shopping street, and like most shopping streets it grew a restaurant scene to keep people from leaving at lunch. What is unusual is how good that scene got. The stretch and the adjacent Gardens on El Paseo hold a real seafood house, a sushi room, a French cafe, and enough casual options to make a full day on foot workable.

The practical case for eating here is that it removes the drive. A down-valley day usually means golf or a trail in the morning, a pool in the afternoon, and then a decision about how far to drive for dinner. El Paseo lets the shopping and the meal happen in the same parking session.

The practical case against it is that this is the valley's most expensive retail corridor, and the restaurants are priced for the shoppers. If you want value, the casual rooms elsewhere down-valley will serve you better.

At The Gardens on El Paseo

Pacifica Seafood Restaurant is the anchor and the reason to plan a meal here rather than fall into one. It does fresh seafood properly, from oysters on the half shell through fish entrees, keeps meat and pasta on the menu for the people at the table who do not want fish, and runs a vodka bar alongside. The outdoor patio looks out over the Coachella Valley, which is the best view of any restaurant on this street.

Tommy Bahama is the other Gardens restaurant, a Caribbean and tropical menu attached to the store. Set expectations accordingly and it does the job: consistent, air-conditioned, and easy with kids in tow.

The Venue Sushi Bar and Sake Lounge handles sushi on El Paseo. Sushi in the desert requires a certain faith, and this is the room down-valley that people who care about it go to.

Off the main stretch

Cafe des Beaux Arts sits in Palm Desert near Shadow Mountain Golf Club and serves traditional French classics in a cafe setting that is chic without being stiff. It is the best breakfast-to-lunch option in this part of Palm Desert and a considerably more pleasant place to sit than anything inside the retail core.

Wilma and Frieda's runs a Palm Desert location alongside its Palm Springs one, which makes it the reliable breakfast answer down-valley for a group that has already used it up-valley. Chef Tanya's Kitchen covers vegetarian and vegan cooking with locations at both ends of the valley, and it fills a gap that El Paseo's steak-and-seafood core leaves wide open.

Between those three, most meals that are not dinner are handled without leaving the neighborhood.

Timing the street

From roughly November through April, El Paseo is busy and the patios are the point. Reserve for dinner, particularly at the Gardens restaurants, and particularly during Indian Wells tennis season and the golf tournament weeks when the down-valley hotel inventory fills.

Summer flips it entirely. Retail hours contract, some restaurants close for stretches of the hottest weeks, and the patio views that justify the street in February are unusable until well after sunset. If you are here in July, eat late and eat indoors, or eat at the house.

Places change hands out here, and restaurants attached to retail turn over with the retail. Ask your local manager what is currently open and worth the drive before you build an evening around a specific table.