Devour the Desert
A Palm Springs Food & Culture Journal
The Local Celebs | Post, Beam, and Baseline: The Mid-Century Rhythm of Kirk Douglas
There is a particular kind of gravity required to survive Hollywood, and an even rarer kind needed to build a life that spans over a century.
Kirk Douglas had both. Long before he was the cleft-chinned icon of the silver screen, he was Issur Danielovitch, born to illiterate Russian-Jewish immigrants in Amsterdam, New York. His childhood was stripped of romance, defined by the biting cold of upstate winters and the literal grit of his father’s trade.
Local Questions, Vol. 13 | Field Notes From Palm Springs: The Little Mysteries We All Wonder About
After a couple of days in Palm Springs, you stop asking tourist questions.
You already know where to find a good margarita.
You've figured out the pool.
You've accepted that the mountains somehow look both impossibly close and impossibly far away.
Instead, your curiosity starts drifting toward the little mysteries.
Why am I suddenly Redfinning real estate ads with my morning latte?
Why are the roofs so low?
Why are all the front doors orange or pink?
Why does the airport feel like the place your vacation actually begins?
And why is the brunch waitress delivering my hash browns decked out in stilettos and a purple feather boa?
The desert, as it turns out, rewards people who notice things.
Local Questions, Vol. 12 | Field Notes From Palm Springs: Getting in Hot Water, Bears and Other Matters of Great Concern
Congratulations.
You've been in Palm Springs long enough now to realize that the questions keep on coming.
And, as we peel back the layers of the onion, maybe they also get more interesting.
And concerning…
Welcome to Volume 12, our next edition of the Field Notes series.
Today, we're getting ourselves in hot water with our first question. Let's jump in. Or better yet, ease in... no telling how hot things will get.
The Local Culture | Joseph Barbera Found a Home in Palm Springs. His Cartoons Still Feel at Home Here.
There are people who come to Palm Springs to escape their work.
And then there was Joseph Barbera.
Barbera was one-half of the team behind Hanna-Barbera, an animation studio whose work is embedded in American pop culture, whether or not we recognize the name.
Tom and Jerry. Yogi Bear. Huckleberry Hound. The Flintstones. The Jetsons. Scooby-Doo. The Smurfs.
It is a rather impressive list for two men who began by making cartoons about a cat trying to kill a mouse.
The Local Questions, Vol. 11 | Field Notes From Palm Springs: The Desert Is Not Impressed
Welcome to another edition of Field Notes From Palm Springs, brought to you by Artisan Food Tours.
This is the place where we ask the weird, wacky and wonderful questions that come to mind once your eyes have glazed over from the sun, your water bottle has been empty for the last forty-five minutes, and everything in sight is beginning to shimmy like a 60s go-go dancer.
Let’s tackle a few seemingly random questions… and then go find a happy hour where the lights are low and the AC is high.
The Local Flavors |Palm Springs Tiki, Part Two: The Man Who Invented Donn Beach aka “Don The Beachcomber”
Donn Beach liked to tell a good story.
This was fortunate, because he had a lot of them.
One of his favorites concerned a choice his father supposedly offered him: money for college, or money to travel around the world. Donn chose the world, naturally, and embarked on what became an unusually long trip. He wandered through the Caribbean and elsewhere, picking up stories, recipes, bits of folklore and, apparently, whatever else he thought might come in handy later.
It is a wonderful story.
It is also a Donn Beach story, which means we should probably enjoy it without insisting too strongly on the paperwork. The problem with Donn's biography is that Donn himself was one of its principal authors.
The Local Questions, Vol. 9 | Field Notes From Palm Springs: Guest Complaints
Welcome to our occasional Guest Complaints issue.
We love our guests.
Really.
But after enough time in Palm Springs, you begin to notice that visitors have questions.
Some are philosophical.
Some are practical.
And some are essentially formal complaints filed against the desert.
Why are the stop lights so long?
Does everything here want to prick me, bite me, or kill me?
Fair questions.
We will address them in the order received.
The Date Shake: Theory and Practice
There is a particular kind of American confidence required to look at the hottest, driest, least forgiving stretch of ground in California and think: palm trees.
Not the palm trees that already grow wild in a handful of shaded canyons nearby, mind you, where springs seep up through granite and the Cahuilla people had the good sense to settle centuries before anyone else showed up with opinions.
No. Imported palms.
Palms from Iraq, Algeria and Egypt. Palms that had spent their entire evolutionary history perfecting themselves along the banks of the Euphrates, now expected to make a go of it in a valley where summer temperatures can reach 120 degrees and the annual rainfall might not fill a shot glass twice.
The Local Questions, Vol. 8 | Field Notes from Palm Springs: Presidents, Cougars and Other Suspicious Characters
Welcome to Field Notes, our occasional collection of questions about Palm Springs, the desert, and the increasingly unlikely things that happen here.
By now you know the drill. Our guests have questions. Lots of questions. Enough to maybe call them issues. We have help for that here too in Palm Springs.
So what's the deal with all the presidents who lived here?
Well, first of all, there aren't that many. There is no record that Millard Fillmore ever even visited.
But there are enough to make you wonder whether the Electoral College has a clause nobody told us about.
The Local Questions, Vol. 7 | Field Notes from Palm Springs: Just How Much Trouble Can a Celebrity Get Into Here?
What is the most outrageous thing a celebrity ever did in this desert sandbox we call Palm Springs?
This is not an easy question.
There is Olympic-level competition for this particular gold medal.
We can start with Harpo Marx.
The Local Flavors | Palm Springs Tiki, Part One: Why the Desert Needed an Ocean
There is something slightly unhinged about ordering a tropical drink garnished with a paper umbrella while standing in a place that receives fewer than five inches of rain a year.
Palm Springs has never been particularly bothered by this contradiction.
For roughly three-quarters of a century, this desert city has cultivated one of America's more improbable fantasies: a Polynesian island dropped into the middle of the desert.
Bamboo. Blowfish lamps. Rum drinks with names that sound like warnings. Flaming torches beside mid-century glass and steel.
It shouldn't work.
It does. But only if you’re able to suspend disbelief.
The Local Questions, Vol. 6 | Field Notes from Palm Springs
Welcome to Field Notes, our grab bag of questions and answers for all things Palm Springs. Today we’re going to focus on a single question, the one I get asked the most when guiding tours.
This question usually arrives somewhere near the end of a tour.
Not, "What's the best restaurant in Palm Springs?"
That's easy enough to Google. Or ask AI.
Instead, "So... where do you go?"
The Local Architecture | The Secret Language of Mid-Century Modern Palm Springs
Palm Springs has many languages.
There is the language of cocktails, spoken fluently from shaded patios at golden hour. There is the language of swimming pools, where a perfectly placed chaise lounge says more than most conversations. There is the language of food, which happens to be our favorite dialect.
But perhaps the city's most distinctive language is one that never utters a word at all.
It is the secret language of Mid-Century Modern architecture.
The Local Questions, Vol. 5 | Field Notes From Palm Springs
Live at the Thunderdome: Coyote vs. Roadrunner. Roadrunner vs. Rattlesnake.
We’ve already established in Field Notes, Vol. 4 that coyotes occasionally hunt roadrunners.
Which means that, somewhere out there in the Coachella Valley, the real-life version of the Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner cartoons is playing out quite differently from the one we grew up with.
But you may not know that roadrunners in turn hunt rattlesnakes.
It's the desert's rough and tumble version of office politics.
Tonight’s Double Bill:
The Undercard:
Coyote vs. Roadrunner
The Main Event:
Roadrunner vs. Rattlesnake
The Local Questions,Vol.4 | Field Notes from Palm Springs
Every Place Has Its Frequently Asked Questions
In New York, it's, "How do people afford to live here?"
In Seattle, it's, "Does it ever stop raining?"
In Palm Springs, the questions get... weirder.
Why is a giant roadrunner strutting through a parking lot like he owns the place? Do I need to worry about stepping on a rattlesnake? Is everybody really retired or just driving a golf cart? And why do the mountains look different every time you glance up?
The Local Questions Vol. 3 | Field Notes from Palm Springs
After enough tours, you realize Palm Springs visitors don't just ask where to eat.
They ask the questions that seem simple—right up until you try answering them.
So what's up with all the orange?
Why are there hummingbirds everywhere?
Should I be worried about the tram?
Every place develops its own frequently asked questions. These happen to be ours.
The Local Questions, Vol. 2 | Field Notes From Palm Springs
The Longer You Stay in Palm Springs, The Stranger Your Questions Become
At first it's practical.
Where should we eat? Why is every third house somehow more beautiful than the last? Is everyone really this relaxed?
Then, somewhere around your second single-origin nitro cold brew and fourth glimpse of a hummingbird, your mind begins to wander.
Which is how you end up asking the kind of questions that only make sense in the desert.
The Local Questions, Vol. 1 | Field Notes From Palm Springs
If you spend even a little time here, you start to notice something strange.
Not the obvious stuff—sunshine, palm trees, mountains that look like a painted backdrop—but the quieter questions that keep popping up when you’re standing in line for coffee or driving down Palm Canyon wondering why everything feels slightly unreal in the best possible way.
Here are a few of those questions.
Call it field notes. Call it curiosity. Call it what happens when a desert refuses to behave like anywhere else.
The Local Celebs | Alfred Hitchcock in Palm Springs: Suspense, Sunshine, and Second Helpings
Alfred Hitchcock spent a career making audiences nervous.
Not frightened exactly. Nervous.
Any director can startle you with a loud noise. Hitchcock preferred a gradual approach. He understood that anticipation is often more powerful than the event itself. This is true of murder mysteries, ticking bombs, and restaurant reservations.
Fear, he knew, was best served slowly.
Like a carefully prepared meal.
The Local Culture | The Oasis of Palm Springs: Nothing This Beautiful Happens by Accident
Palm Springs is a city built on optimism.
It is also built on plumbing.
Visitors rarely think about this. They are understandably distracted by mountain views, perfectly chilled martinis, impossibly blue swimming pools and citrus trees that appear to have signed a long-term lease with the sun.
Everything feels effortless.
It isn't.