Palm Springs' Long-Running Dining Rooms

Palm Springs

The rooms that outlasted the trends

Palm Springs cycles through restaurant concepts quickly. New rooms open with good design and a point of view, run for a few seasons, and hand the lease to the next idea. Underneath that churn sits a smaller set of dining rooms that have been serving the same kind of food, in some cases from the same buildings, for decades.

These are not the places that get written up as discoveries. They are the places that are still open, which in the restaurant business is the harder achievement. If you are visiting for the midcentury architecture, they also happen to be the closest thing to eating in the era you came to look at.

A word of warning about the category: the food is old-fashioned on purpose. Cream, butter, tableside service, a wine list organized by region rather than by story. If that reads as a downside, the uptown rooms will suit you better.

The old-guard dining rooms

Copley's occupies what was once Cary Grant's estate guest house off Palm Canyon downtown, which makes it the most direct link between a Palm Springs dinner and the town's Hollywood period. It has collected awards over the years and it is a proper occasion restaurant, meaning it rewards a reservation and a collar.

Le Vallauris is the French dining room in the same tier, and Johannes does modern European cooking with Austrian roots. Both are grown-up rooms in the specific sense that the tables are far enough apart to talk. Mr. Lyons is the steakhouse, and it does what a desert steakhouse should: dark room, cold martini, and no ambiguity on the menu.

The Purple Room is the outlier and the most fun of the group. It pairs fine dining with live entertainment, which in Palm Springs means a supper club in the sense the phrase originally had. Go for the show as much as the plate.

The delis and the diner classics

Sherman's Deli and Bakery is the institution in this category, a full deli and bakery that has fed the town for a long time and is the correct place to solve lunch for a group with no consensus. Manhattan in the Desert covers the same territory as a New York deli. Between them, sandwich and bakery needs in Palm Springs are handled.

Billy Reed's is the American-classics dining room, the kind of place that does a full menu of familiar plates and a pie case. It is the right answer for an early dinner with grandparents or for a table that includes a nine-year-old with firm opinions.

These are also the rooms that reliably stay open through the summer when more fashionable kitchens go dark for a few weeks. That is not a small thing in July.

Using them well

Book the occasion rooms. Copley's, Le Vallauris, Johannes, and Mr. Lyons all fill in season, and walking in on a Saturday in February is optimistic. The delis and Billy Reed's do not need a reservation and are better used as the flexible middle of a day than as the centerpiece of an evening.

The pairing that makes the most sense for a design-minded trip: spend the day on a self-guided architecture drive, then eat somewhere that has been open since those houses were new. It is the only way to get the period as a whole rather than as a series of exteriors.

Places change hands out here, even the long-running ones, and a room that has been open forty years can still close in a season. Ask your local manager what is currently open and worth the drive before you promise anyone a specific dinner.