About

But it really started in her grandmother’s bakery. Kristi grew up in Southern California in a family of cooks and bakers, and the bakery was where she first learned her way around a kitchen and watched a small food business become part of the fabric of a neighborhood.

Her dad taught her the rest. Growing up in a Romanian family, the year had a rhythm to it: sarmale at the holidays, mămăligă on the stove, cozonac coming out of the oven in December. Every gathering somehow ended up in the kitchen, and that’s really where her love of feeding people comes from.

She started cooking in Joshua Tree much the same way, with dinner parties, friends’ birthdays, whatever someone happened to be celebrating. Word travels quickly in a small town, and somewhere along the way, those dinners turned into Joshua Tree Catering Co.

We cook everything by hand, sourcing locally whenever we can and working with local growers and makers whenever it makes sense. We’ve also never been interested in being tied to one kind of food. It might be tacos one weekend and a Spanish dinner the next. Every event is different, and that’s part of what we love about it.

At the end of the day, food is a universal language. Someone cooks, everyone sits down, and a few hours later nobody wants to leave. Getting to be a small part of those moments, and of this community’s table, is something we don’t take for granted.