The desert dining destination with a cult following

For more than a decade, La Copine has been one of California’s most beloved desert dining destinations—a deeply personal, fiercely independent small restaurant that transformed a remote roadside space near Joshua Tree into a cult favorite for locals, road-trippers and celebrities alike (everyone from Kate Moss to Robert Plant).

The duo opened the restaurant in 2015 shortly after getting married to recreate the experience of the night they first met. Now, founders and life partners Claire Wadsworth and Nikki Hill are sharing the recipes and philosophy behind the restaurant in their debut cookbook, reflecting on love, queer community, hospitality and what it means to build a creative life on your own terms in the high desert.

—Interview by Kelly Dobkin, edited by Bianca Prieto

Why was now the moment to write a cookbook?

We knew we had enough recipes to fill a cookbook, and we just didn't know where to start. We needed help. Food writer Ben Mims (who ended up co-writing with us) had introduced us to a publisher who had been to our restaurant. And then the kicker was that a very powerful literary agent came into the restaurant and he came up to me at the end of his meal and said: “I have never waited two hours to eat anywhere in my life. I'm a New Yorker, and it was worth every minute. Would you consider making a cookbook?”

And that night, he emailed us, and later he wrote the proposal with us. We could not have done this without him. And also, the release of the book is perfectly timed because it happened to be our 10th anniversary.

Your cookbook featuring over 100 recipes from your restaurant weaves together food, love and a very intentional way of living. How did building a life and business together in a place like Joshua Tree change your understanding of success—both personally and creatively?

On our first day, we had 65 people come and eat at the restaurant, and we felt like, “Oh my god, this is huge.” Since we are a tiny restaurant, we are only open four days a week from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. So coming from working bigger jobs in L.A., we love the work/life balance. We are able to pay our bills and also take breaks, that’s the definition of success to us now: It’s time. Having a certain amount of days off—that is almost unheard of in our industry.

So we like to say we’re “desert rich.” We're not millionaires, but we're just happy because we have that balance.

How did you go about staffing and finding people in a place as tiny as Joshua Tree?

We were literally begging people to ask everyone they knew at first. We hired ex drug addicts, people fresh out of jail. We had people who've never cooked, never served etc. It just started out very rough. But the more momentum we got, the more that people realized, we are very experienced actually at what we do. And then once we got some press (thanks to writers like Bill Addison and Tejal Rao), it became a lot easier to find great staff because they just came to us.

What advice do you have for other restaurant owners who are thinking about writing a cookbook?

Find a really good literary agent and a good editor. Fight for every single thing that you want. Otherwise, you're just gonna put something out that you're not proud of and then you're not going to want to go out there and promote it.

So I think you have to know your vision. And we knew exactly what we wanted when we started this. We had a lot of time to write the proposal, and I think that was key.

The Prep's Take

Wadsworth and Hill didn't build La Copine to scale. They built it to sustain—their lives, their partnership and their connection to the desert community around them. The result is a restaurant with a decade-long following that no amount of paid marketing could manufacture. For independent operators, the lesson isn't about being in a remote location or writing a cookbook. It's that knowing exactly what you want your restaurant to be, and refusing to compromise on it, is its own competitive advantage.

Thanks for reading today's edition! You can reach the newsletter team at editor@theprep.co. We enjoy hearing from you.

Interested in advertising? Email us at newslettersales@mvfglobal.com

Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here to get this newsletter once a week.

The Prep is written by Kelly Dobkin and edited by Bianca Prieto.