Phil Stefani never really intended to take up permanent residence in the high desert. The San Francisco chef was burned out on the local food scene (and on commuting from his East Bay home to get to work), and he needed a break.
“I had no plans to live here permanently,” Stefani told SFGATE. “It was like, ‘Let’s just go reset.’”
He and his wife headed to their small vacation home near Joshua Tree in 2019. But partway into their six-month plan, the pandemic hit. “The whole world shut down,” he said, “and we had already fallen in love with being here by that time.”
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Chef partner Phil Stefani at Red Dog Saloon in Pioneertown, Calif., on May 18, 2026.
Ed Rudolph/Special to SFGATE
Stefani very quickly found himself in the middle of a restaurant revival that is helping to reshape the character of the high desert by bringing historic businesses like Pioneertown’s Red Dog Saloon back to life.
“San Francisco is like this vortex,” he explained, “and if you tap into it, it’ll give, give, give, give, give until it doesn’t give anymore. And it had stopped giving for me, I think, probably years before I actually realized it.”
“And Joshua Tree is also a very powerful energy vortex that I think if you are tapped into it and you have no expectations and you come down here for the right reasons, it’ll show you the way,” he added.
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A Joshua tree stands at attention at sunset.
Rohit Arora/500px/Getty Images
Now, the Bay Area native, who started the popular Cosmic American Voodoo Van food truck in SF, is a chef partner at Red Dog and the Copper Room in Yucca Valley, two beloved restaurants with long legacies in the high desert. While the Copper Room went through many iterations over the years — a 1950s Rat Pack hangout and a local dive among them — Red Dog was always Red Dog … until it wasn’t. While the saloon was one of Pioneertown’s original buildings and the first-ever restaurant in town, it suffered two huge fires and had been closed for something like 30 years before reopening in its current iteration.
Pioneertown was founded in 1946 by Hollywood investors who sought to create a town specifically designed as a shooting location for Westerns. But it wouldn’t just be a movie set. It would be a functioning town where casts and crews could live while filming and where others, some who ran the town’s businesses and some who just wanted to feel like they were living in the Old West, could take up permanent residence. Among its founding investors: legendary screen cowboys Gene Autry and Roy Rogers.
Red Dog Saloon dates back to 1948, the second business to officially open in town, according to “Pioneertown, USA: The Definitive History of Pioneertown, CA: Where the Old West Lives Again” by Kenneth Gentry. Original owners Al Lipps and Don Kokx used a historic wooden bar from a saloon in Oatman, Arizona, that burned down in 1909. Their place would be a film set during the day and a watering hole at night; actress and singer Dazzlin’ Dallas Morley would often perform there.
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Red Dog Saloon in Pioneertown, Calif., once allowed cowboys to ride in on their horses and order beers for both humans and animals.
Ed Rudolph/Special to SFGATE
It became an instant draw, not just for its offerings but for its sense of wildness. Cowboys were welcome at the bar, but so were their horses. “The San Bernardino County Mounted Posse would ride their horses up to Pioneertown and directly into the Red Dog Saloon on an annual visit,” Gentry wrote. “Their routine was simple: Ride to Pioneertown, ride into the saloon, hitch the horses at bar, order the horses a pitcher of beer, order themselves a beer… and then watch Dazzlin’ Dallas!”
The saloon survived a huge fire in 1959, but it wasn’t so lucky in 1966. A kitchen blaze burned Red Dog to the ground in a matter of hours. “It was nearly impossible to extinguish the flames as the building was constructed out of old railroad ties which were heavy with combustible oils,” Gentry wrote.
Though the owners at the time rebuilt and reopened that same year, Pioneertown’s population was declining, and it was in its last gasps as a filming location. The Pioneertown Corporation, which had founded and incorporated the town, had disbanded in 1964, leaving the area in its current iteration as an unincorporated community within San Bernardino County. Red Dog closed its doors in 1974 and, despite a few failed attempts to reopen, stayed shuttered until 2020.
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A view of Red Dog Saloon in Pioneertown, Calif., on May 18, 2026.
Ed Rudolph/Special to SFGATE
Ben Loescher of LA architecture firm Terrain, which owns Red Dog, partnered with Mike and Matt French to reopen the saloon. The brothers, through their hospitality company Life & Times, had opened the rehabbed Pioneertown Motel in 2018. (Loescher is also responsible for the Mane Street Historic Overlay, a multiyear preservation and oversight plan to protect Pioneertown from overdevelopment.)
“The goal was, let’s make this look and more importantly feel the way that Pioneertown and the Red Dog did” back in its heyday, Mike French told SFGATE via phone.
“In the high desert alone, there’s just all this amazing old Hollywood history that when we showed up was, in our opinion, kind of under-celebrated,” he added. “People know about the Joshua Tree Inn and Gram Parsons and Pioneertown, of course, but diving a little bit deeper into these stories, I was surprised at how cool and interesting and quirky some of this stuff was that wasn’t readily available.”
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Red Dog Saloon’s small stage has hosted huge musical acts, with the most recent one being Jason Momoa’s band Oof Tatatá, in Pioneertown, Calif.
Ed Rudolph/Special to SFGATE
While the space still had the original bar from its 1966 reconstruction — complete with years of carvings of patrons’ names, which are still preserved today — most of the interior was a blank canvas. Now, it’s an homage to the saloon’s film history, with photos of screen cowboys on the walls and a small stage where musical acts perform regularly. (In early June, Jason Momoa’s band played a surprise show.)
The Frenches brought in Alperin Enterprises to create the beverage program and LA restaurant group Last Word Hospitality of Found Oyster and Hermon’s fame to handle the food. (The same investors reopened the Copper Room in 2022 and are currently working to revive the iconic Lord Fletcher Inn, another Frank Sinatra and Rat Pack favorite, in Rancho Mirage. The French brothers are also in the process of opening Miracle Hill, a geothermal bathing experience in a 1913 adobe in Desert Hot Springs.)
Stefani was hired in the summer of 2020. That’s how he found himself opening a restaurant that August, right in the worst of the pandemic restrictions on public gatherings, when it could only operate as a to-go establishment.
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Everything at Red Dog Saloon in Pioneertown, Calif., is scratch-made, from the taco fillings to the tortillas to the salsas.
Ed Rudolph/Special to SFGATE
“Chef Ari [Kolender], who’s the culinary director of our restaurant crew, had the opening menu, and we workshopped that for a few weeks, and then next thing I know, it was like a line down the block,” Stefani said.
Even though the saloon couldn’t serve guests inside until the following summer, the growth was 60% between its first and second years. “It was just madness,” he added. “I wouldn’t change it for the world. It was the best thing that ever happened to me.”
Today, even on nights when A-list heartthrobs aren’t doing surprise shows, or renowned street artist Shepard Fairey isn’t playing a DJ set like he did earlier this year, Red Dog is consistently packed with both locals and tourists from LA and SF. They’re there for the entertainment, the barrel-aged cocktails and the Wild West vibe, but also very much for the food. The menu, largely tacos and burgers, is totally scratch-made, from the marinades to the tortillas to the desserts. The “bronco burger” is made with meat ground to Stefani’s specifications and comes with jack cheese, rajas peppers and house-made chipotle sauce and ketchup. All the meats for the tacos are long-braised: the chicken in tomato and chili, the carnitas in cider, and the brisket in beer and tomatillos.
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Chicken tinga tacos on the bar at Red Dog Saloon, which has the names of past guests etched into the wood, in Pioneertown, Calif.
Ed Rudolph/Special to SFGATE
People “fall in love with everything because everything that we do here is from scratch,” Stefani said.
“We make our own churros that are vegan and gluten-free. We make our own gluten-free corn line cookies. We make our own buñuelos.” They also make their own version of the much-missed Choco Taco, which has become Red Dog’s signature dessert. It’s so famous that it has its own billboard on Twentynine Palms Highway.
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“We’re sold out because we can’t keep up with demand,” Stefani said on the day I visited, crushing my dreams of finally trying one, my third failed attempt to do so. “We put this billboard up, and we went from doing 100 Choco Tacos a week to doing like 300 a week. … We need a whole facility just to do these Choco Tacos.”
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A barrel-aged Manhattan at Red Dog Saloon in Pioneertown, Calif.
Ed Rudolph/Special to SFGATE
Billboard-famous desserts aside, Red Dog does have an undeniable draw, in part from its unusually interesting setting and in part because of how much it pays tribute to its history.
“It’s the greatest thing,” Stefani said. “To me, this is the greatest place, the most magical place in the world.”
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