Chefs Share the Inside Scoop on Their El Paseo Restaurants

El Paseo is home to a diverse collection of restaurants. While some are big-name eateries with locations around the country, others are independently owned and operated by locals who have a passion for cooking and, after honing their crafts for years, opened their dream restaurants on this destination boulevard. Here are three of their stories.

The Golden Bounty

Sally Hill had spent much of her adult life in the restaurant business, working as a server, bartender, and cocktail waitress throughout the Coachella Valley. Her career trajectory changed when she took a cooking class at College of the Desert. “That was it for me,” Hill says. “The first day I knew — I’m supposed to be cooking.” After completing a two-year culinary program, she found a position in a resort kitchen in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Hill developed her culinary prowess there for a few years before opening her own restaurant in Big Bear in 2007. Sweet Basil Bistro focused on California cuisine and quickly became a success. After more than a decade, Hill decided it was time to sell and move back to the desert full-time, where her long-time partner lived. “I was tired of driving back and forth, and I wanted to get out of the snow. I wanted a new and improved Sweet Basil.”

When her real estate agent mentioned an available location on El Paseo, Hill hesitated. “I felt like I might be a little too bohemian for the street. I knew El Paseo had great credentials, so it was a little intimidating, but as soon as I walked in, I had the vision,” she says of the space, which now houses Sweet Basil California Eatery. “There was something about the feel and the size of it. I wanted to keep it small and intimate. It was perfect.”

Opening Sweet Basil’s doors at the height of COVID in late 2020 had plenty of challenges, but it also allowed Hill to create a beautiful, plant-dotted patio that remains today, where diners nosh on Hill’s healthful dishes centered around fresh ingredients like her beet-quinoa salad, grilled artichoke, and crispy lobster cakes over fennel-apple slaw.

“It’s been very validating for me as a chef to be on El Paseo and to be successful,” she says. “I feel right at home here now.”

The Skillful Slice

A decade before Hill joined the Palm Desert restaurant scene , a then-twentysomething sushi chef was looking to open his first restaurant. “I was young. I was new. I didn’t have a lot of money. It was a lot of tough things on top of each other,” recounts Engin Onural, chef and owner of sushi restaurant The Venue. “I had to convince landlords to write a lease to a young kid. I was trying to sell my dream to someone.”

It wasn’t the first time he faced challenges pursuing his dream. As a kid growing up in Turkey, Onural fell in love with sushi, of all things, eventually leaving his home country to attend the Sushi Chef Institute in Los Angeles, where he trained in the art of sushi-making and studied the culture and history of the Japanese sushi world. “I come from somewhere similar. … We care so much about our culture, so I really understood,” he says. Still, getting his first job wasn’t easy. “This was 20 years ago, and back then, even though I checked all the boxes, it was hard for me to get into places because I was not Japanese.”

He managed to land a sushi chef job at a Japanese fusion restaurant in Orange County and was later recruited by JW Marriott Desert Springs Resort & Spa in Palm Desert to open its lobby sushi bar, serving as the head chef before moving over to the Renaissance Esmeralda in Indian Wells to do the same thing. A few years later, he was ready to go solo. “I started to like this area. I had my own regulars, and I decided I’m going to do my restaurant here,” Onural continues. “El Paseo was it.” He found a semi-hidden, courtyard-fronting space and, with finances tight, did much of the renovations himself. He opened The Venue, with a menu of innovative sushi rolls and artful plates, in 2011.

Since then, he’s made multiple trips to Asia for inspiration, represented the United States at the World Sushi Cup, and has opened additional restaurants in Palm Springs and Phoenix, which feature many signature plates he first dreamed up at The Venue, including the namesake Venue Roll filled with spicy tuna, cucumber, and gobo and layered with seared salmon. His fabled sea scallops served in their shell and topped with pistachios, yuzu vinaigrette, and briny sea beans are not to be missed.

Onural recently refreshed his Palm Desert flagship, updating the interior, expanding the patio, and rebranding the restaurant as The Venue Sushi & Spirits Redefined to reflect his new unique cocktail menu. “The way it’s laid out kind of makes you feel like you’re in a little European city,” he says. “It’s a really nice, different vibe.”

The Love of Famiglia

Italian-born Mario Marfia, meanwhile, had decades of experience as a chef — cooking behind the line in his home region of Sicily, in London, and in Los Angeles — prior to landing in Palm Desert with his family. Marfia and his wife, Marika, opened the stylish Il Corso in 2014. The Marfia family had spent the year prior designing and building the restaurant to feel like a farmhouse straight out of Tuscany. “The feel is homey, and we try not to be corporate. If someone asks for something not on the menu, we want to say yes,” says Claudio Marfia, Mario and Marika’s son, who helped manage the Palm Desert restaurant for years before opening a second location in Palm Springs and shifting his attention there to serve as chef and owner. The elder Marfia continues to run the El Paseo location.

The recipes that we focus on are Tuscan and Sicilian dishes — arancini, cioppino, branzino, pasta. Everything is fresh,” Claudio says. “Everything is made to order, nothing is pre-cooked. It’s a simple classic Italian kitchen.”

Part of Il Corso’s success stems from the fact that both father and son plunged into the restaurant world at a young age. Mario made gelato as a teenager in Italy, eventually moving to London to kick off his formal culinary career. Decades later, Claudio would shadow his dad in the restaurant kitchens he helmed in L.A. “That was basically my after-school activity,” he recalls. “My dad would have me cleaning calamari, peeling potatoes, washing dishes. I was always more excited going to work with my dad than going anywhere else.”

Years later, Mario encouraged Claudio to learn different culinary styles from other chefs, which he did in kitchens in the United States and Europe, but he eventually found his way back to the family restaurant business. “Sometimes it’s tough, but it’s rewarding, and it’s really a community,” Claudio says. “You have people that come two or three times a week. They’ll ask me, ‘How’s your daughter, how’s your wife?’ They’ve become almost like family.”

The other chef-owners share in that sense of family, noting it’s the long-standing relationships with loyal customers that they treasure most about running a business on El Paseo. “We have so many regulars. My team knows them by name, and we know what they like,” Onural echoes. “We’ve seen their kids grow up. We see people who come from Europe every year, and we give hugs. That energy is a special energy. It’s a special bond.”

Hill agrees, adding that a big chunk of her customer base lives here either full- or part-time. “They appreciate the fact we’re independent and that I’m able to get creative. They come here a lot, and we’ve really gotten to know each other.”