Culinary Cool Lives In Palm Springs
At Cheeky’s, though, the emphasis is on the flavours of Mexico, not surprising for a town just 200km from the border. Rich, soft scrambled eggs spill out of the corners of a spicy breakfast quesadilla, a savoury base of fried masa is topped with tender strips of steak, pickled onions, refried beans, fresh cheese and diced cactus paddles in an exemplary huaraches. While not strictly Mexican, the renowned bacon flight – five varieties of artisanal bacon on one plate – is as necessary an order as a reviving bloody mary. Bacon flights might not seem very California spa food friendly, but as anyone who’s tasted the Thai sweet chili bacon can attest, diet rules are made to be broken.
There’s a kind of devout adherence to using local ingredients that extends beyond the menu to the cocktail list
If there’s one restaurant that best sums up the current Palm Springs culinary mood of redefinition, it’s the sleek new Workshop Kitchen + Bar. It’s housed in a Spanish Colonial heritage building that dates back to the 1920s, but the restaurant’s interior is decidedly contemporary. Resembling a kind of brutalist temple to gastronomy, the room, with its 27-foot high peaked ceiling is built around poured concrete surfaces including a vast communal table that bisects the room. Intimate booths flank both sides and the whole space is illuminated by bare bulbs hung from long, black cords. Old school and new, together in one place.
Aside from the architecture there’s a kind of devout adherence to using local ingredients that extends beyond the menu to the imaginative cocktail list. Pureed avocados are mixed with rum and pineapple juice in the creamy, intense Emerald Star. Local citrus is squeezed both for its juice and its oils while farmer’s market carrots are juiced to be blended with Scotch, ginger and lemon in the Carrot Penicillin.
Workshop Kitchen
