I drove my rental car down Old Woman Springs Road, past dusty shrubs and the occasional Joshua tree, its limbs outstretched like a scarecrow hoping to hitch a ride, and utility poles with drooping wires that continued into the horizon forever.

Refuge of the roads

A squat white building housed the restaurant. Its paved parking lot looked conspicuous from the highway: an asphalt rectangular surrounded by endless sandy land. I’d understand later that I’d arrived at an unusual lull in service on a Sunday afternoon. The dining room — spare and neutral in color, save for a wild mural depicting geometric symbols and a large jackrabbit — wasn’t quite full.

Even on a slower afternoon, though, the heart animating the place was unmistakable.

Claire Wadsworth and Nikki Hill opened La Copine in the Flamingo Heights area of Yucca Valley in 2015.

(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)

Nikki Hill and Claire Wadsworth, the owners of La Copine, met in Philadelphia in 2009, fell in love and relocated to Los Angeles three years later. Hill is a chef; Wadsworth is a musician. They married on International Women’s Day in 2015, and a couple of months later they took their first trip to the desert.

While visiting the domed Integratron the pair learned about a restaurant space six miles away that had long been standing vacant. They bought it, moved nearby and opened La Copine in September.

In our commodified, risk-averse world, the notion of the culinary beacon in the middle of nowhere is all but a romantic myth. Not that Joshua Tree and environs are any sort of secret. One can essentially take virtual house tours of whole streets by scrolling the area’s Airbnb options.

But there was, and remains, something uncanny about La Copine. In Hill’s cooking you taste self-determination: the joy of someone devising dishes and leading her own crew after years of working for others. The menu of salads, sandwiches, vegetable plates and several entrees doesn’t read as radical or idiosyncratic. But the combinations are so intentional, and the plucking of global ideas so thoughtful, that the results come off as personal. Once you’ve attuned to her specific penchants for acidity, and picked up on her habit of sneaking subtle creaminess among crisper or crunchier textures, and experienced the intangible somethingness that distinguishes such accomplished, soulful chefs, you’d know Hill’s food anywhere.

An addition of griddled ham is the move for La Copine’s breakfast sandwich, which also includes fried egg, muenster, smoked shishitos, date jam and arugula on an English muffin.

(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)

I remember two dishes most clearly from my first meal: the salad and the fried chicken.

The pile of greens had one foot in Lyon and the other in Santa Monica. Kerchiefs of smoked king salmon, haricots verts, radishes and fried capers hid among torn bibb lettuce, crowned with a poached egg and united with a mustard-herb dressing. Underneath was a modest slick of crème fraîche powdered with caraway. It had been assembled with a light hand. Every element clicked. On a day nearing 100 degrees outside, it was downright thirst-quenching in its freshness.

Chicken leg and thigh had been brined in buttermilk and dredged in potato flour for a crust with a tight, rippling crackle. Hill served the bird over peppery cheddar grits, with pickled green tomatoes splayed alongside. I could see devotees traveling for hours for this specialty alone.

Also, though, mass-appeal dishes have a way of taking over kitchens, and fried chicken is especially labor intensive. So it was off the menu when I returned to La Copine earlier this month. A close variation of the bibb lettuce salad had stuck around, however, as beautifully composed and nourishing as I’d recalled.

A great restaurant keeps getting better

These days I don’t believe the restaurant has a single slow shift. Locals and visitors fill every table and bar seat for the five hours it operates, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., Thursdays through Sundays. Some people snag limited reservations available by texting a number on the restaurant’s website; most know to show up and wait. No one vibe defines the customer mix, but it felt like an inclusive, welcoming space in 2018, and it still does in 2024.

Much of that stems from Wadsworth’s ebullience. Her star-wattage smile sets the tone for the friendly, fleet front-of-house staff. They race inside and out — Hill and Wadsworth built a roomy patio to accommodate outdoor dining during the pandemic — in great T-shirts and flowing desert-chic fashion. I was amazed how upbeat this group stays in the face of constant busyness.

Nikki Hill and Claire Wadsworth stand in the ever-busy dining room of their daytime restaurant La Copine.

(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)

Hill’s menu has evolved to include more breakfast plates. Her take on French toast uses sourdough baguette, which retains gentle chewiness after a soak in cinnamon-vanilla custard. Muenster gives her fried egg sandwich some punch; yes to adding griddled ham to offset the smear of date jam.

And come to think of it, there is technically fried chicken on the menu in the form of piccata, as insistently lemony as I would expect from Hill’s cooking and set over her wonderful grits.

In success, some restaurants freeze, stagnating in their winning formula. The food at La Copine is surer in execution without losing its sense of identity, vital and curious. “California cuisine” has no real definition, and also dozens of them, but it fits here.

Most every writer who finds their way to the restaurant can’t resist calling it an oasis in the desert. Even with the crowds, its reputation as a refuge feels truer than ever.

Don’t miss …