Devour the Desert
A Palm Springs Food & Culture Journal
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 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 Flavors | Palm Springs Cocktail Culture: How a Desert City Turned Leisure Into an Art Form
Palm Springs has always understood the importance of a good drink.
Not merely the liquid itself, mind you. Plenty of places serve cocktails. Palm Springs elevated them into a social activity, a fashion accessory, a networking tool, and occasionally a competitive sport.
The Local History | Meet the Pioneer Women Who Created Palm Springs
Before Palm Springs was a mid-century modern oasis filled with Hollywood glitz, it was a rugged, isolated desert outpost. The oasis of palm trees and hot springs was a challenging place to live, yet in the early 20th century, a remarkable group of determined women settled this arid valley, laying the foundation for the glamorous resort town we know today.