Guide · Eating
Fourteen places across the basin, when to go to each, and the two reservations worth making before you leave home.
The first thing to understand is that "Joshua Tree" is four separate towns strung along forty miles of Highway 62, and the food is not evenly distributed. Yucca Valley has the volume. Joshua Tree village has the tourists. Twentynine Palms has quietly become the most interesting place to eat in the basin. And Flamingo Heights — the unincorporated stretch where we live, twelve minutes north of the highway — has one restaurant that people drive from Los Angeles for.
What follows is what we tell guests standing in our kitchen on their first morning, in the order we tend to say it.
In this guide
La Copine and Pappy & Harriet's. Both take reservations, both fill weeks ahead on weekends, and both are the reason a fair number of people come out here at all. Everything else on this list you can walk into with patience. These two you cannot.
If you only book one thing about your trip that isn't the house, book a table at La Copine.
Old Woman Springs Road · 1 minute from the house
A farmhouse restaurant that has no business being this good on a stretch of highway with no streetlights. The menu moves with the season; the fried eggplant has survived every rewrite for a reason. Thursday through Sunday, dinner service. If the reservations are gone, take the chef's counter as a walk-in — turnover there is faster than the wait time suggests.
Old Woman Springs Road · 2 minutes
Brick-oven pizza, a proper cocktail list, and a music venue out back that books better acts than a room this size should. Walkable from our gate if you've had a drink, which is not a sentence you get to write often in the high desert.
Old Woman Springs Road · 4 minutes
Attached to a gas station, easy to drive past, and genuinely excellent. This is the answer on the night nobody wants to get back in the car. Closed Mondays.
Pioneertown Road · 15 minutes
A cantina on a 1946 western film set that turned into one of the most storied small music venues in America. The barbecue is good and the room is the point. Check the marquee before you book — on a show night the whole thing changes character around nine o'clock. See our events calendar for the weekends when it will be impossible.
29 Palms Highway · 20 minutes
Where to eat before a Park day. Tartines, good coffee, compostable everything, and a to-go counter built for people about to spend six hours somewhere with no shade. Weekend mornings run long — go at seven or go at eleven.
Aviation Drive · 20 minutes
A supper club at the edge of the airstrip that has not meaningfully updated its lighting since Sinatra was a regular, and shouldn't. Dark, a little pricey, cocktails better than they need to be. The best dressed-up dinner in the basin that isn't La Copine.
29 Palms Highway · 22 minutes
Diner booths, a pool table, bone-marrow butter on the burger. Dog-friendly patio. Opens at four most days, noon on Saturdays.
29 Palms Highway · 21 minutes
The late kitchen. In a basin where almost everything closes at nine, the Tiny Pony is still serving, and on some nights there's a drag show. Weekend brunch from nine.
Four restaurants within one hundred yards of each other at the main crossroads, all of them busy, all of them worth it for different reasons.
29 Palms Highway · 27 minutes
Decades old, unusually strong vegetarian menu, chili worth ordering on a cold morning. Breakfast and lunch only, closes at 2:30.
29 Palms Highway · 27 minutes
Enormous portions, a courtyard, and pancakes people are still describing to each other in the parking lot. Expect to wait on a weekend.
29 Palms Highway · 27 minutes
Pizza and cannoli, with a dedicated gluten-free oven — the only one we know of out here, which matters if it matters to you.
29 Palms Highway · 27 minutes
Roasting behind glass at the back. Their house style runs darker than current fashion; if you want a bright light roast, know that going in.
Forty minutes east, and the most improved stretch of the basin. If you're doing the Park's north entrance anyway, eat here rather than doubling back.
Mesquite Avenue · 42 minutes
Caribbean-inflected, a beautiful courtyard, a small general store attached. Reserve, and take the outdoor table at sunset.
29 Palms Highway · 40 minutes
Gastropub with a separate fryer, a serious gluten-free bun, and live music some nights. Closed Sundays.
29 Palms Highway · 37 minutes
Birria and octopus tacos, unassuming from the road, open ten to ten every day. The reliable answer when everything else is closed or full.
Amboy Road · 1 hour
An hour east on a road with almost nothing on it, and then a bar with live music, karaoke and a patio full of people who drove just as far. It is not a detour, it is the destination. Friday to Sunday only — check before you commit an evening to it.
Three things visitors consistently get wrong out here. Kitchens close early — nine o'clock is late in the high desert, and Sunday and Monday closures are common even in high season. Distances read short and drive long, because everything sits on one highway and you will be on it. And the good places are small: La Copine seats a fraction of what its reputation suggests, which is why the reservation matters more than the timing.
The other thing worth saying: cook at least one night. There's a full kitchen, an outdoor dining table under the arches, and a fire pit twenty feet from it. The map has the markets and the deli. Some of the best meals people have out here are the ones they made themselves at seven in the evening while the light went orange on the plaster.
Seven Arches is a 1968 hacienda on two acres in Flamingo Heights — one minute from La Copine, fifteen from Pappy's, twenty-five from the Park. Four bedrooms, a cowboy tub, and a very dark sky.
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