How a Palm Springs eatery ended up on the Mt. Rushmore of kosher-style, family-run Jewish delis

“We’re headed into the holiday and about to start our busiest time of year, and my purveyor was out of matzo meal,” he told SFGATE. “I called around and finally hooked up with a Jewish deli in Vegas. And, thankfully, he says, ‘I’m not currently having a problem.’ So he hooked me up with his guy from another distributorship. That day, my manager drove to San Bernardino and met a guy with matzo meal.

“You have to learn how to adapt. It’s not just us; it’s not just the one thing. If you have that problem, everyone has that problem. There’s no sense in whining or bitching and moaning — you’ve got to band together and take care of it.”

Sherman’s got its matzo meal and didn’t miss a single order of the restaurant’s renowned matzo ball soup. It’s another “everyday miracle” of running a six-decade-old institution that refuses to do anything not from scratch, Harris said. 

“My father was a real ball buster,” the reed-thin 63-year-old says. His trained gaze represents a lifetime in hospitality: Harris has mastered the art of looking directly at you while clocking everything around him. “He came from a generation of restaurateurs here who did things the right way. That’s why our pastrami, the corned beef, the brisket, the lox — everything we do, we do in-house. We roast our own beef every morning. We bake the bread every morning. We make the chicken salad, tuna salad, egg salad from scratch. We boil the egg. We peel the egg. It’s like coming home, only you don’t do the dishes …

“But there’s something else, the real secret …” 

And with that sentiment hanging there, Harris excused himself to greet a customer who was looking a little lost at the check-in stand.

(Left) Sam Harris, son of Sherman Harris, sits inside the family deli and bakery and holds up a picture of his father with a pair of friends and fellow Palm Springs restaurant pioneers; specialty Hanukkah cookies baked at Sherman’s Deli & Bakery.
(Left) Sam Harris, son of Sherman Harris; specialty Hanukkah cookies.

This wasn’t an unusual occurrence. During my hourlong meetup with Harris, he was up and down like a jack-in-the-box. He ran food. He asked if he could sit down in a four-person booth to chat it up with a party of three. He refilled drinks. He checked in with three different members of his staff about customers’ tabs. He went off to examine a batch of Hanukkah cookies custom-baked for an event, half in the shape of a dreidel, half in the shape of the Star of David. He was worried about how they’d be packaged for maximum freshness. He toured the kitchen. He toured the bakery. He removed from the wall a framed photo of his father and a pair of other Palm Springs restaurateur legends and brought it back to the table to show off.

In the photo, three octogenarians are holding beggars’ cups with a sign that reads “Will work for food.” They are Sherman Harris; David Lyons, who owned Lyons English Grille — now Mr. Lyons Steakhouse — for over 70 years; and Ron Fletcher, who owned Lord Fletcher’s, an English pub and steakhouse in Rancho Mirage frequented by Frank Sinatra in the evenings that recently shuttered after five decades.

“Look at these guys,” he said. “All of them just tough as nails. But they knew how to do it. They knew they had to work harder in Palm Springs. When you’re a destination, when people travel to come see you — they don’t expect less, they expect more.”

That was the ethos of Sherman Harris, who was born in Wisconsin and enlisted in the Army at age 18. Harris fought in the Battle of the Bulge during World War II. After his time in the service, he moved to Palm Springs in the early 1950s to be a cook. While at California’s famed Laurye’s Steak Ranch, Harris was credited with inventing the “early bird dinner.” He went on to open his eponymous deli in 1963 in the same location where we were sitting on Tahquitz Canyon Way, about a block-and-a-half from the heart of downtown Palm Springs. His daughter, Janet Harris, runs a second location, in Palm Desert.

At the time of Sherman’s opening, the town had three Jewish delis. Sherman Harris also ran a coffee shop and a steakhouse and won the concession at the top of the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway, which also opened in the fall of 1963. 

But it wasn’t an easy life. He was “slowly killing himself,” Sam Harris said. “He had too many businesses, so he had a mild heart attack, and the doctor told him, ‘Get rid of these or you’re going to die. And so he did.’”

While Sherman shrunk his empire down to just the tram concession, son Sam went to work for Coco’s, a Southern California-based chain of diner and pie shops. There, he learned how to run restaurants and manage out of his father’s shadow. 

After more than a decade at Coco’s, Harris said he was ready to rejoin the family business. The original Sherman’s location came back on the market, and the Harris family bought it back. The family reopened its flagship in 1994. Sherman and Sam ran it together, prior to Sherman’s death at age 84 in 2008. 

“The family was out of the deli business, probably 20 years,” he said. “But the people that bought it closed it, and it was the perfect time to bring it back. 

“And this time we focused on being a Jewish deli and a bakery — and that alone. And that’s what we’ve been doing ever since.”

It didn’t take long for Sherman’s to earn back acclaim — and its loyal customers. In a time when the number of Jewish delis around the nation was starting to shrink, Sherman’s seemed to only grow stronger, better, more well-known year over year. 

Now the Palm Springs standout is up on the Mount Rushmore of kosher-style family-run delis, regularly mentioned in the same breath as Canter’s in Los Angeles and Katz’s in New York. Sherman’s got its Guy Fieri bona fides with a visit from “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” in 2017. 

For locals, any visit to the desert starts at Sherman’s. 

“Sherman’s for breakfast … then again for lunch is what I tell people who are only going to be here for a weekend,” Lisa Vossler Smith, CEO of Modernism Week, told SFGATE. “You really, there isn’t anything like them — and they represent who we are.”

The food and the atmosphere at Sherman’s are special in their ordinariness and consistency. That’s not a knock. The deli doesn’t pander to the midcentury fervor that grips most of greater Palm Springs, nor has it succumbed to an uncomfortable stool, subway tile, and Edison bulb version of the modern aesthetic. The deli is not wood-paneled with grainy black-and-white pictures on the wall like Katz’s, nor does it have the oversized crescent moon-shaped booths you can sink into for hours of Canter’s. 

The chairs and tables at Sherman’s are of the time of its rebirth, very early 1990s conference room chic. The booths are straight out of Monk’s Cafe on “Seinfeld.” All of it is comfy and inviting but not necessarily for an all-day affair. Both the indoor and outdoor spaces are made to turn over quickly. 

The bakery counter often has a line of its own out the door, with people moving swiftly and leaving with their arms full of confections like black-and-white cookies and oversized slices of multilayer cakes. It’s a big, bright space that is well-staged and well-choreographed, and the customers are its stars.

(Left) A baker mixes a batch of frosting; to keep up with the holiday rush, bakers work nearly around the clock at Sherman’s Deli & Bakery.
(Left) A baker mixes a batch of frosting; to keep up with the holiday rush, bakers work nearly around the clock at Sherman’s Deli & Bakery.

“We just don’t have a Jewish deli anymore in Seattle,” John Cadrea told SFGATE. He and his wife, Char, were visiting the establishment for the second time within the first 36 hours of their Palm Springs vacation. “When you find something that’s real, you tend to come back to it.”

I too ate at Sherman’s twice within the first two days of my arrival. From start to finish, it’s an experience where everything moves with precision. If they say a wait is eight minutes, it’s not going to be seven or nine. Upon seating, sliced kosher dill pickles arrive along with water — you don’t have to ask. Then a drink order is taken, accompanied by the delivery of crayons and a children’s menu. The beverages are dropped before you can start a conversation. 

From there, main courses are ordered. The starter arrives almost immediately. I recommend going with the matzo ball soup, especially during the winter months, when Palm Springs can actually dip into the 50s during the day.

As far as the entree goes, I’ve had the brisket sandwich upon recommendation, and would say that’s the must-try for carnivorous first-timers; it contains perfectly curated burnt ends and is done better than any deli on the West Coast. But this time around, I dove into the pastrami, the restaurant’s signature sandwich, twice — just to make sure consistency claims were correct. 

Sherman’s pastrami is sliced thinner and piled about a quarter inch higher than its notable deli contemporaries, and even that’s by design, Harris said. It falls into the restaurant’s narrative that “everything Sherman’s does has to come out just a little bit bigger and better.”

Like the beloved Palm Springs restaurants of time past, celebs have loved Sherman’s from the beginning. But if there’s one strain of notables, it’s the comedy act/singer/entertainer. 

Harris, of course, has his stories dating back to when he was a kid. He said Sinatra wasn’t much for lunch, but when he partook, he could find himself at Sherman’s. Van Halen’s vaudevillian frontman David Lee Roth stops by when he’s in town. The city’s favorite hosts of yore, Dinah Shore and Zsa Zsa Gabor, were known to grab a bite here between a morning tee time and an evening soiree. Bob Hope was a regular but apparently not a very good tipper. 

And then there were the cut-ups. “Shecky Greene — oh wow, when he gets going, maybe one of the funniest people on Earth,” Harris said. “Adam West — the original Batman — he was awesome. So funny, so sweet. He was just a crack-up.

“A lot of characters, all of them great, but you know — this is also a place to come and hide out and enjoy a meal. Everyone has bad days, days they need to recharge.”

If there’s one thing all of its customers — the celebrities, the locals and the visitors — have in common, it’s that they all are treated the same, Harris said. “Over there, there’s a big guy from the industry,” he noted, gesturing to a gentleman eating in the corner with his bichon frise trolling for scraps at his feet. “And next to him, some of our regulars here for breakfast.”

Those regulars were Tristen Isabelo and Angelo Iba, born and raised in Palm Desert, who make Sherman’s their first stop multiple times a week. “For me, it’s breakfast, always,” Iba said. “You just, it’s one of those places where you know what you’re going to get. The eggs, the bread … everything is so consistent — and yet, that’s something of a surprise.”

On my way out, I found Harris to say goodbye, and he asked me if I needed anything else. At first, I paused, not wanting to revisit a moment of our conversation that had come and gone, but I couldn’t resist. 

So I asked him what the secret was.

“Oh that,” he laughed. “There isn’t one, not really. My father always said you can have a restaurant with the best steaks in town — the best — but if the service is bad, they’re not going back. It’s the staff here, the cooks, the bakers, the servers — the people, they’ve been with me forever. They care. 

“If you forget about people that got you to where you are, if you think it’s all about you, you’re done.”

Sherman’s Deli & Bakery, 401 E. Tahquitz Canyon Way in Palm Springs and 73161 Country Club Drive in Palm Desert. Open every day, 8 a.m. to 9 p.m.