Native Foods
Native Foods is one of the oldest vegan restaurants in the US (it’s celebrating it’s 20th birthday – how awesome is that!?)
Your first stop in Palm Springs if you’re vegan should be to go to Native Foods for their carrot cupcake with vegan cream cheese frosting. Delish!
Wholefoods and other supermarkets.
A Wholefoods is opening in Rancho Mirage very shortly (early to mid 2014). There’s already a Trader Joes and the regular supermarkets already carry vegan staples like Daiya cheese. There is a fancy grocery store called Jensens that had Daiya but Vons had it for $2 less per packet.
The Palm Springs area is made up of 9 more or less neighborhoods that are each designated as their own city and run along one main road – CA-111 (technically a highway but more like a regular road). Palm Springs itself is the first one you’ll reach coming from LA but then they run into each other as you drive along the main road. The street is called “Palm Canyon Drive” inside Palm Springs itself CA-111 and Palm Canyon Drive are basically the same road.
I mention these points because neither the Trader Joes or the Wholefoods is technically in Palm Springs but they’re not far away and I prefer not to stay in Palm Springs itself anyway.
Check out Yelp for other vegan options.
Yelp will direct you to some some other options that serve vegan food as well as non-vegan food. There is a branch of Z Pizza (a pizza chain) and they do vegan pizza with Daiya. However the reviews are very mixed. Hopefully the Wholefoods will do vegan pizza when they open as their vegan pizza is consistently great when it’s fresh out of their oven (as opposed to the slices, which can have been sitting a long time and become dried out).
There are a few places that do vegan wraps and some vegan breakfast items but the reviews are a bit mixed and I wasn’t enticed enough to make a trip to check them out. There are lots of supermarkets, Targets, Wal-marts and the like where it’s easy to pick up things like salad ingredients. These all seem to have at least a small selection of Amy’s brand Vegan frozen foods as well. Since it’s warm and the whole place exudes a healthy atmosphere, salads and other light meals are probably going to be just what you feel like while you’re here.
