Lots of winters, I’ve been lucky enough to join in the migration unique to a certain subspecies of Los Angeles native where flocks of family units pick up and move five hours by oversold mechanized bird west to an abbreviated hyphen of sand in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. But I don’t mean to sound dispassionate or cynical or something, because the nagging concerns of existential meaning1 that the previous sentence might appear to have summoned kind of just slink away when that first warm blanket of air wraps you up in the middle of December, when the roars of leaf-blowers and the 101 have been traded for the soft lapping of the sea, when you first pull up to the shining white sprawl of a resort where everything from the photocopied New York Times crossword puzzles waiting at breakfast to the pool waterslide helps aid in the dissolution of whatever negative thoughts might be careening around between your ears.
Never mind that the concept of vacation as escape is turned into this sort of farce due to the feeling that all inhabitants of Southern California who travel to Hawaii during the holidays end up staying at one of three hotels within half a mile of each other on the western shore of Maui and hyper-image-conscious businesspeople/kids/vague acquaintances bump into their peers all week long, except that all the judging here goes on while everybody is half-naked. Never mind all of that; it’s totally possible to ignore the Dark Side of this scene and just chill out.
Right up front let’s just say Death Valley is not a destination trip for foodies. Don’t fool yourself for a minute on that score. Death Valley is where you go to see extraordinary beauty, hike mind blowing rock formations, find God or ingest mushrooms (not particularly in that order), but one does not go for culinary arousal. Not that you can’t eat well and enjoy some surprisingly good meals but as my illustrious travel companion (i.e. foodie daughter) pointed out, that is because we weren’t expecting much.
Some ten years ago, I went to dinner one night with no expectations. A
London newspaper had asked me to write about Lapérouse, an old warhorse
of a restaurant overlooking the Seine on the Left Bank—it was doing
historic Paris restaurants, and this one’s been around forever. I
politely suggested that there might be better candidates, because as
far as I knew, this place was still a slumbering tourist table flogging
its past: it has several charming tiny private dining rooms with badly
scratched mirrors—as the legend goes, these cuts were made by ladies
testing the veracity of newly offered diamonds (real diamonds cut
glass). 
The first time I ate at Coco Lezzone in Florence, it was at the invitation of film producer Dino De Laurentiis, who knows a thing or two about Italian cooking: 
Is it an accident that LouLou's opened near the residence of Bertie Wooster? I don't think so!