Upscale Palm Springs Restaurants Snubbed by TripAdvisor

It was a bad day Thursday for pricey top restaurants in the Coachella Valley as a new list of the nation’s best 25 eateries failed to include anything in Southern California.

Bouley, the expensive, famed culinary icon of French dining in New York, was rated the number one restaurant in the United States, according to the just-released list from TripAdvisor.com.

The website that rates restaurants, hotels, airlines and tourist attractions based on user reviews found New York to be the center of fine dining in the nation, with five of the restaurants on the top-25 lists being in the “Big Apple.”

Le Bernardin, Daniel, Eleven Madison Park and Per Se were the other award winners from New York.

Major Palm Springs-area restaurants thought by some local critics to be on a par with any of the nation’s best eateries failed to show up on TripAdvisor’s list. Famed local restaurants top-rated by another user-generated reservation and review company, OpenTable.com, include The Edge Steakhouse at the Ritz-Carlton in Rancho Mirage, Le Vallauris, the upscale French restaurant with a beautiful patio in Palm Springs and Wally’s Desert Turtle, traditional American elegance in Rancho Mirage. But they were all ignored by TripAdvisor, even though diners can easily spend hundreds of dollars for a night out at any of the three.

The Palm Springs area wasn’t alone in being ignored. No Los Angeles restaurant was included in the TripAdvisor list.

While Southern California was snubbed, Northern California was well represented with four winners, including pioneering Chez Panisse in Berkeley, The French Laundry in Yountville and Restaurant Gary Danko and Kokkari Estiatorio, both in San Francisco.

Even Minneapolis, Chicago, Hawaii, Orlando and Houston were on the list, with Charleston, South Carolina having two restaurants in the nation’s top 25.

--City News Service, photo courtesy of Le Vallauris