In the north of Yucca Valley, along a parched desert road, a white shoebox of a building appears on the horizon, mirage-like. Most days you’ll spot it by its full parking lot, because La Copine isn’t just a destination for desert dwellers. Tourists and celebrities travel from other cities, states and even countries for a taste of California through the lens of two culinary tastemakers who left it all behind in L.A. for a life in the desert.
A new cookbook — “La Copine: New California Cooking from an Oasis in the Desert,” out April 28 — will allow fans to bring the high desert home with dishes such as vibrant salads, French toast, fried chicken and gooey cheesesteaks that incorporate regional crops such as olives, apricots, sunchokes, pomegranates, pistachios, stinging nettles, citrus and dates, and plenty of vegetables for cooling off in the heat.
“We’ve given you all the tools that we know, and we haven’t left anything out,” said chef-owner Nikki Hill. Claire Wadsworth, her partner in both the restaurant and love, runs front-of-house operations.
Together with co-author and former L.A. Times cooking columnist Ben Mims, they’ve compiled the recipes for some of their seasonal restaurant’s most popular items: English muffins with date jam, fried chicken with pickled green tomatoes and spicy honey, coconut rice pudding with citrus and fennel-spiced pepitas, and lemon polenta cake.
They’d long considered writing a cookbook but didn’t know where to start. Then, one New Year’s Eve, their future literary agent visited the restaurant and said it was worth his two-hour wait, then doubled back and asked if they’d consider writing one.
They dove in, but wanted to expand beyond the concepts of brunch or desert-inspired dining. They wanted to tell their full story, a journey from L.A. to sweeping desert vistas.
In 2015 Wadsworth and Hill — the latter of whom cooked at Venice’s Scopa — were looking to open a restaurant in L.A. and planned to lease a space in Mar Vista, but they were wary of the high rent and necessary renovations. Then a friend invited them to her home in Pioneertown, and on that trip they saw the sights that have enamored countless Angelenos to desert living: visiting Joshua Tree, sipping smoothies on a scorching day, getting caught in a quick rain storm.
“We felt if we go to the desert, we’ll know if this is the restaurant for us,” Wadsworth said. “We said, ‘We’ll put our feet in the dirt and just see what the earth tells us.’ And it sent us on a completely different path.”
They hoped for clarity, which they found in an entirely different restaurant space. A proprietor of the famous Integratron rejuvenation center informed them of a restaurant for sale nearby. They could pool their savings, and with small loans from family members, launch their dream without the major financial backers they’d have to find in L.A.
When the previous owner handed over the keys, his last words were that they might want to invest in a shotgun.
“It felt like a real opportunity,” Wadsworth said, “but it also felt scary as hell. The desert felt scary back then, like, ‘Are there dead bodies buried here? Is there someone gonna come in and rob us at gunpoint?’”
“Or, ‘Will they accept us for being gay?’” Hill added.
There are still deliveries of hate mail from conservative neighbors who disapprove of their lifestyle, and occasional drive-bys punctuated with curses yelled from car windows, but they’ve largely been accepted by the community. And La Copine — French for “the girlfriend” — has proved more popular than they ever imagined.
On opening day, they thought 10 people might show up. Sixty-five of them did, with Hill the only person cooking and Wadsworth washing plates to order because they were running through their tableware so quickly. Over the next three months they hired two or three staff to help. Now they manage a team of 25, who seat an average of 80 guests an hour.
The regulars and neighbors sustain the restaurateurs, providing community and roughly 40% of their business, but La Copine quickly became a destination for tourists — many of whom are repeat customers, and many of those visit from L.A. and the Bay Area multiple times a year. One guest flies in from France annually for her birthday. Another mentioned she lives in Nashville but has eaten at La Copine seven times.
And then there are the celebrities.
John C. Reilly once walked in wearing a head-to-toe baby blue suit and top hat in 100-plus-degree weather. Kate Moss and her daughter each ordered grilled bread, a piece of cake with extra crème fraîche and iced coffee, while Olivia Wilde once ordered two Wild & Free salads in one sitting and Robert Plant once enjoyed the Grits & Greens.
Those recipes, of course, are all in the book, which also highlights making the most of one’s pantry and grocery aisles with techniques “designed to bring out the best of any ingredient.”
There are no calls for expensive equipment. Even the more esoteric ingredients — such as arrowroot starch — can be found in big-box grocery stores.
And though Hill and Wadsworth never plan to expand La Copine with more locations, they have big dreams for the restaurant’s future, including on-site greenhouses and shifting to a format that could see employee stakes in La Copine. They want to give their team the same partnership, work-life balance and “happy place in the universe” that they’ve found since their own move to the desert.
“The bigger prize to us is quality of life,” Hill said. “To be honest, us doing the cookbook feels like a risk. You invest a lot into it, you hope that people are gonna receive it well. We’re spreading the word and the love that way more than needing multiple locations. That sounds so stressful to me. Just to get La Copine staffed and with people of integrity who show up on time and take it seriously? We won already. Why mess that up?”
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