Workshop Kitchen + Bar restaurant review - Palm Springs, USA

Visitors to Palm Springs often fall hard for the modernist architecture and Frank Sinatra fabulousness. But Michael Beckman chose instead to open his new foodie destination in the 1920s Spanish-Deco El Paseo building and update it by nearly a century with monolithic concrete panels and 27-foot-high cathedral-ceiling trusses. Manhattan's SOMA Architects brought in sleek light fixtures by Beirut-based PS Lab (likely on the recommendation of Lebanese restaurateur and co-owner Joseph Mourani), which makes the contemporary tableware by Heath Ceramics positively glow. Beckman, who studied at the Paul Bocuse Institute in Lyon and honed his cooking as a private chef in Beverly Hills, via a three-Michelin-star restaurant in Burgundy, has developed a menu of local, seasonal ingredients - admittedly no great challenge in America's Sunniest City - that entertains eclectic proteins like squab, octopus, lamb sausage and oxtail, incorporated into light pastas and pizzas. Or you can share a whole chicken or rib-eye with the table.