Workshop Kitchen & Bar

Workshop Kitchen & Bar occupies one of Palm Springs’ more layered buildings. Constructed in 1926 as part of the El Paseo building in the Palm Springs Design District, the structure served as the desert’s first theatre through the 1930s into the 1950s, was home to the Palm Springs City Council from 1944 to 1948, and more recently housed a Design Within Reach showroom. Chefs Michael Beckman and Joe Mourani, who met while studying at the Paul Bocuse Institute in Lyon, France, partnered in 2012 to repurpose the building, then worked with New York-based architect and artist Michel Abboud to convert the space into a Brutalist composition of poured concrete, including a communal dining table and a private dining altar at the rear.

The kitchen sources seafood from the Dory Fleet at the Newport pier, poultry and dairy from sustainable farms in Hemet, and herbs and vegetables from the team’s own garden plots, including a planter bed in Rancho Mirage, with much of the cooking done over a wood-fired grill and oven. Workshop won “Outstanding Restaurant Design” from the James Beard Foundation in 2015, and has been Michelin-recommended four times since the guide’s arrival in the region.

For NOTES, Workshop Kitchen & Bar matters as a study in adaptive reuse: a Spanish-revival theater turned council chamber turned showroom, ultimately given back its civic role as a gathering place — this time around a kitchen rather than a screen.