Tony Marchese
Trio's Tony Marchese
“Remember playing ding dong ditch as a kid?” Tony Marchese asks me as we steadily work our way through glass after glass of ice water on a hot Palm Springs summer day. We’re sitting toward the back of Trio, the hugely popular uptown restaurant Marchese started with a wing and a prayer 13 years ago in the depths of the recession. He’s talking excitedly about CV Harvest Box, a farm-to-table delivery venture he started with Aziz Farms’ Mark Tadros at the start of the pandemic. After five minutes with Marchese, you realize he does nothing without a high degree of enthusiasm. He’s an all-in kind of guy.
“In the beginning of the pandemic, that’s how we delivered our boxes of food. I’d take the box to the door, ring the bell, and run for my car. And our customers would open their doors, look down at their $30 box of groceries and then up at this guy taking off in his $60,000 car.”
Though Marchese can laugh at the absurdity of the situation now, it wasn’t so fun for restauranteurs like himself at the beginning of the pandemic when state and county and local directions and restrictions were sometimes contradictory and often confusing. Marchese is the first to admit that he’s not the most patient guy in the world (though he works at it) and he wasn’t simply going to close up Trio for the duration and sit on his hands. “The shutdown came in early March and by mid-April, I was down at Aziz Farms helping to fill up boxes.”
The idea first percolated in Marchese’s brain after he read about a business in Virginia Beach called Neighborhood Harvest. Marchese knew that many of the local farmers often didn’t sell half their produce and with so many people home-bound and without access to fresh fruits and vegetables, a similar model in the Coachella Valley might be a win-win for the community. “I called Mark and asked him, ‘Hey, you want to do this? This is too big for me.’ And he said, ‘Oh no, we’re going to do this together.’ And I’ve been going down to Aziz Farms every Friday and helping to fill boxes ever since then.”
However, unlike some farm-to-table operations, CV Harvest isn’t just about filling a box with rutabagas and Persian cucumbers that didn’t get sold. They have a private label that produces olive oil for them and a local girl who bakes gluten-free banana bread. Every box contains recipes on ways to use the ingredients. At the height (or, rather, depth) of the pandemic, Marchese estimates they were packing between six and seven hundred boxes per week. Though the number has declined slightly, their ambition hasn’t. He and Tadros are already marketing their CV Harvest boxes as far away as Glendale.
Vegetable packer is one of the many re-inventions Marchese has experienced. The Chicago native started out in the bar and restaurant business with Rumba, the first Brazilian restaurant in the Chicago area. But it wasn’t just the exotic cuisine that made Rumba unique. From opening time until shortly before 11, the restaurant was devoted to food service. But then as midnight approached, gay men would line up at the side entrance. The restaurant’s table covered a dance floor and once dinner service ended, the staff would push all the tables out of the way and precisely at 11 p.m., the lights dimmed, the boom-boom-boom of the music began, and the place filled with men dancing and socializing. It was a huge success among the North Shore crowd.
Marchese says that eventually he moved into real estate, first in Chicago, and then when he arrived in Palm Springs in 2005. “I was brilliant,” he says sarcastically. “Millions of dollars in houses and condos. I didn’t pay attention. In those days you could buy a house with no money down. By 2007, I was busted and lost everything. But still, I knew I was meant to be in Palm Springs.”
Despite the fact that he and his partner Mark (a chef) no longer had a pot to piss in nor a window to throw it out, Marchese got wind that the landlord who owned the space where Trio now sits was about to evict a restaurant tenant who had not paid rent in living memory. Every friend they had told them they were crazy to open a new restaurant in the middle of a recession with every business the length of North Palm Canyon holding on by their fingernails.
But Marchese had a concert. Maybe more like a mantra. Food, art, and music. For him, it was the magic trio.
It turned out that Marchese was crazy like a fox. After Trio opened its doors in 2009, the neighborhood (now formally known as the Uptown Design District) saw a rapid retail blossoming with boutiques and new restaurants like Trina Turk, the Shag Store, Christopher Kennedy, Workshop, and 849. While the traditional heart of Palm Springs may still be around the Plaza Theatre and the intersection of North Palm Canyon and Tahquitz, Marchese and his fellow Uptown merchants shifted the town’s buzz north of Alejo. Marchese’s creed of “determination, commitment, and consistency” has been key to keep his doors open and tables occupied for the last thirteen years. Though temporarily shuttered like everyone else during the darkest days of the pandemic, he had his outdoor dining area up and running just 72 hours after the county issued its guidelines for restaurant re-openings. The classic menu (I cannot resist the wedge salad and braised short ribs), ever-changing art, the excellent music playlist, and the great staff make it the obvious choice any night of the week.
Just as his CV Harvest Box demonstrates, Marchese is interested in more than just keeping Trio in the black. When Palm Springs High School still had its culinary program, he was a major donor and supporter. He’s on the board of AAP-Food Samaritans, which provides nutritional support to low-income persons living with HIV-AIDS and other chronic illnesses. His standard deal with galleries who show the art that hangs on Trio’s walls is that 10% of the art’s price tag goes to local charities. His philosophy is simple: “When you give to the community, the community gives back to you.”
