Our Story · Fire · Salt · Lineage
We come from butchers.
Three generations of them — from Lebanon, to the mountains of Colorado, to the Coachella Valley.
We come from food. From farms to grocery stores, from butcher shops to Sito’s kitchen, from hotels to restaurants, this family’s whole life has been food and the feeding of people.
The trade taught us to know the source, respect the animal, understand the cut, tend the fire, and feed people generously. In 1992, the three-generation family Legacy found a home on South Palm Canyon Drive.
This is the story of Kaiser Grille — and of the chophouse it was always meant to be.
THE LINEAGE
A trade carried across an ocean and a continent.
It started behind a counter, the way these things do.
The family came from Lebanon with a trade in their hands. They carried it west — across an ocean, then across a continent — and set it down in the mountains of Colorado. In Vail, Kaiser Morcus broke porterhouse behind a meat counter. He cut for Gerald Ford. He cut for everyone else the same way, which is the only part of it he would have wanted repeated.
Zahlé, Lebanon
Gore Range, Colorado
“The Lebanese recipes came down from Sito and from my mother, hand to hand across the generations.”
— Lee Morcus
THE OTHER INHERITANCE
The knife came from the butchers. The welcome came from Sito.
A family can hand down more than one thing at a time.
From the butchers came the standards — the source, the cut, the trim, the refusal to serve anything you would not put in front of your own family. From Sito — grandmother, in Arabic — came everything else: the table, the recipes, and the conviction that everyone who walks through the door should be warmly welcomed and leave as a well fed friend of the family.
Sito set a table the way the eastern Mediterranean has always set a table. Everything in the middle. Nothing portioned. People reaching across one another, talking with their hands full, staying an hour after the plates are cleared. That is still how this family eats, and it is still how we suggest you eat here.
You will find Sito in many of our recipes. In the labneh, the za’atar and the roasted date butter that arrive with the bread. And you will find her name on a table in The Block & Barrel, where the welcome is loudest and the door is closest to the street.
PALM SPRINGS · 1992
The family lights a fire on Palm Canyon Drive.
In 1992, Kaiser Morcus and his son Lee opened a restaurant together on South Palm Canyon Drive and put the father’s name over the door.
The room it lives in is a Palm Springs story of its own. E. Stewart Williams — the architect who gave this city much of its shape — built it in 1956 for Haggarty’s. Our family’s story eventually moved inside, and neither has left.
For more than three decades, this corner has held the rest of it. Residents and first-timers. Anniversaries and ordinary Tuesdays. Business dinners, first dates, and the grandchildren of people who ate here the first year. Menus changed. The desert changed. The city changed around us.
Four things did not: Mediterranean flavor, food cooked over fire, somebody from this family in the house, and our unwavering standards.
The family timeline
The trade travels.
The fire stays lit.
A family trade carried from Lebanon to Colorado, then brought to the corner of Palm Canyon Drive.
The butcher’s trade begins, and the recipes with it.
Kaiser immigrates to America.
Kaiser Morcus breaks porterhouse behind a meat counter in Vail.
Kaiser Grille opens in Palm Desert on El Paseo.
The restaurant takes the Williams building, the corner it has held ever since.
In-house aging, butchery, and live fire continue to be the center of the house.
BACK TO THE CENTRE
Not a reinvention. A return.
In the summer of 2026 we closed the doors, to make more visible, what has been within it the entire time.
The butcher’s room came back to the centre — our own aging room, our own block, every cut broken and trimmed by hand on the premises. A live-fire kitchen was built around a 108-inch oak-and-charcoal grill, a 750-degree almond-wood oven and four rotisseries. The fires are almond, oak and cherry lump charcoal. Nothing else, ever.
The dining rooms were refurbished. The Block & Barrel was was established in the front of the house — a full bar in the middle of one room, which is the shortest distance there is between this family and a guest.
This is not a reinvention of the Kaiser Grille that has been welcoming guests since 1992. This is about reverence and respecting the authentic soul and spirit that founded our restaurants in the first place.
FROM OUR FAMILY TO YOUR TABLE
Three generations. One fire. One block.
The butcher’s trade, the Lebanese recipes, the live fire and Sito’s welcome all sit under one roof now, on the corner this family has held since 1992.
Come for dinner in the dining room. Take a stool at The Block & Barrel. Sit outside and watch the evening come down off the mountain. However you arrive, you will be welcomed the way this family has always welcomed people — with a place at the table, something on the fire, and a glass raised to your health ~ Sahtein!
SAHTEIN. TO YOUR HEALTH.