Renowned California chefs Feniger and Milliken open buzzy Palm Springs restaurant: Alice B.

To longtime desert residents, it’s a scenario that first sounds as familiar a local cliché as pastel-colored doors and grandpa getting another sunburn out on the golf course:

Two city slickers spend long and successful careers in Los Angeles, they rise to the top of their field and even earn that most coveted of LaLaLand triumphs to prove it: their own TV show. Now, they're looking east to Palm Springs for their next chapter.

Except as it turns out, the renowned restaurateurs Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken aren’t coming to the desert for retirement. On the contrary, they’ve chosen Palm Springs as the newest frontier of a restaurant empire that long ago cemented them as two to know in the crowded LA and Vegas restaurant scenes.

But the locale isn’t the only thing that sets apart the Palm Springs restaurant, which is called “Alice B.” and opened last week, from Feniger and Milliken’s previous collaborations.

There's the setting, inside the new Living Out luxury housing community at the intersection of Tahquitz Canyon Way and Hermosa Drive.

There’s also the food itself, which eschews the ambitious modern Mexican cuisine that has been the focus of many of the pair's well-known restaurants and their 1990s Food Network TV show "Too Hot Tamales" TV show in favor of what Milliken referred to as a “very American kind of menu with a lot of influences from the Mediterranean.”

Those influences can be seen in featured dishes like the branzino (a European seabass), a hummus appetizer and the braised lamb shank, which is served with olives, a tangerine relish and polenta.

The business partners also say they are starting with a small menu which they will gradually expand. But they caution that diners shouldn’t get too attached as the offerings likely will be ever-evolving in order to take advantage of both what’s in season from California’s natural bounty and their own latest culinary discoveries.

“That’s a big part of what I get really excited about is finding like this new sustainable cobia from Panama that’s being farmed and it’s an absolutely delicious fish,” Milliken said. “I’m always bringing new ideas into the mix about products that are being launched.”

The menu is also being shaped by a third figure: Chef Lance Velasquez, who came to Palm Springs from San Francisco, where he once worked in the kitchen at the city’s famed Restaurant Gary Danko. Among his contributions to the menu? Cornmeal cheddar drop biscuits. Palm Springs first got to know Velasquez's biscuits when he opened the now-closed Biscuit & Counter here.

Iconic pair served as restaurant's inspiration

But even with Velasquez on board, Alice B. is a celebration of women and the power of their partnerships.

Feniger explains that the restaurant is named after Alice B. Toklas, the life partner of avant-garde writer Gertrude Stein. Toklas is known for the salons she and Stein hosted with literary luminaries like Ernest Hemingway, the couple's large art collection and the cookbook she wrote that combined recipes with memories from her own life. Toklas and Stein have long served as an inspiration, Feniger and Milliken said (although the two are not themselves in a relationship).

“I’ve always said my dream would be to have a restaurant where you could have piano all the time,” Feniger said. “We don’t know yet what we are going to do with that, but we do think it’s going to create a very cool bar vibe.”

The space also includes retracting doors that open onto a patio with expansive views to the mountains and a bar with the kind of piano you could’ve imagined a three-drink-deep Frank Sinatra sliding into for a turn if Alice B had opened up 60 years earlier.

Toklas and Stein’s love of art is also central to the look and feel of the restaurant, which is decked out with pieces sourced exclusively from Palm Springs-area artists. While that art is the aesthetic focus, they say the space otherwise has a comfortable feel that combines mid-century and more modern elements and is punctuated by what Feniger described as several large statement “chandeliers.”

The bar also further nods to Toklas and Stein’s era with drinks named after several of the artists from the period.

Of course, the choice to name the restaurant after Toklas carries added weight given the restaurant’s location in Living Out, which describes itself as “Southern California’s first and only luxury, 55-plus active adult community designed for and marketed to the LGBTQ community.

Feniger and Milliken said opening a restaurant in Living Out has also been meaningful to the two of them given what Milliken describes as their experience of kitchens and restaurants as places of welcome. She noted that for many LGBTQ people, the first place they’ve ever felt comfortable was a kitchen.

“The kitchens have always been a place where we just accept everybody, absolutely no barriers in any way, race, orientation, whatever,” she said. “It feels great to be supporting Living Out by bringing this delicious food and bringing energy. We hope to attract all kinds of people.”

Feniger said she also hopes the restaurant will become an example of what both women and members of the LGBTQ community can do in the world.

“For someone young to be able to see here is what someone can do from that community, I think that’s really important” she said.

Paul Albani-Burgio covers growth, development and business in the Coachella Valley. Follow him on Twitter at @albaniburgiop and email him at paul.albani-burgio@desertsun.com.

This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: Inside Alice B. — Palm Springs' art-filled new restaurant