Stuft Pizza: From a Takeout Shop to a Desert Favorite

At Main Street and Avenida Bermudas, Stuft Pizza’s tile roof and shaded patios make it an easy landmark in Old Town La Quinta. The restaurant looks settled into its desert surroundings. Its story, though, began nearly three decades before it arrived here.

Jack and Pat Bertram opened the first Stuft Pizza in Cerritos in 1976. The family’s La Quinta restaurant followed in 2004, with Palm Desert joining in 2014. By 2026, those dates represent 50 years of the Stuft name, including 22 years in La Quinta. The story connects an original pizza recipe with a second generation’s broader idea of what a neighborhood restaurant could offer.¹

1976: a small start in Cerritos

Before Stuft had dining rooms in the desert, its founders concentrated on the pizza itself. The history supplied by the restaurant and published by the Greater Coachella Valley Chamber of Commerce describes roughly nine months of recipe development before the first shop opened. That original Cerritos business sold pizza for takeout.

A second shop followed in Whittier two years later. In 1986, Stuft began franchising, extending the name beyond the founders’ own counter.² That expansion helps explain why a Stuft restaurant elsewhere may look different from the two familiar desert locations: the name has a history spanning multiple operators and restaurant formats.

2004–2014: a new desert chapter

Opening in Old Town La Quinta in 2004 gave the family a setting for an expanded restaurant. Pizza remained central, but the desert version added table service, a full bar and a much wider range of meals. By the time the Palm Desert opening was announced in 2014, the business was promoting seafood, steaks, lunch, happy hour and catering alongside its pizzas.

In that contemporary opening announcement, John Bertram identified Jack and Pat as his parents and distinguished the two family-operated bar-and-grill restaurants from franchisees continuing the original pizzeria format.⁴ It was a second generation developing a different restaurant experience around a business the first generation had established.

The two desert addresses also offered different surroundings. La Quinta placed Stuft in the Main Street dining and shopping environment of Old Town La Quinta. Palm Desert brought it to the shopping center then called Westfield Palm Desert, now The Shops at Palm Desert, along Highway 111. The restaurant’s current history identifies both as Bertram family operations.¹

Explore Stuft Pizza’s timeline

The timeline draws on the restaurant’s history, its Palm Desert opening announcement and dated local reporting. The 2026 figure is calculated from the 1976 founding year.^{1, 2, 4, 5, 8}

The recipe that carried forward

A restaurant can change considerably while keeping one part of its identity recognizable. For Stuft, the dough provides that connection.

In Marissa Willman’s 2021 Palm Springs Life feature, John Bertram traced the dough to his father’s original recipe and described making it by hand each morning. The same interview explained that maintaining the result still involved adjustments, including flour choices and water temperature. Continuity in a kitchen requires attention to the process, as well as possession of a recipe.

The menu had also become more adventurous. That 2021 article described a Napa Valley pizza combining ingredients such as apples and brie, alongside more familiar pizza combinations and meals beyond pizza.³ Those examples belong to the menu documented at that time; today’s selections can change. Historically, they show how far the desert concept had traveled from a pizza-only takeout counter.

Learning to work with the desert

One revealing change happened outside the kitchen. In December 2023, Crystal Harrell reported in Coachella Valley Weekly that the La Quinta location had completed a major patio reconstruction. Bertram described replacing outdoor structures and rebuilding elements of the space, with improvements to shade, wind protection, flooring and permanent heating.

For a desert restaurant, those details affect the experience of sitting outside. A patio needs to respond to weather as well as look inviting. The renovation offers a concrete example of the business applying what it had learned from years of operating in La Quinta.

Harrell’s interview also addressed the people running the restaurants. Bertram described helping with everyday service tasks and emphasized employee retention and the relationships customers develop with staff.⁵ Those were his explanations of the business’s approach, and they give the history a useful perspective from its operator.

Community beyond the table

The public record includes connections beyond ordinary restaurant service. NBC Palm Springs reported in October 2024 that Stuft was marking twenty years in the valley with donations of hundreds of pizzas to first responders, schools and nonprofit organizations.⁸

Earlier that year, KESQ reported that Stuft was partnering with The Shops at Palm Desert and the YMCA of Palm Desert on a free Father’s Day weekend pizza event for families.⁹ These dated examples show the restaurant participating in community activities alongside its regular business.

A lasting place in local dining

Local reader polls offer another way to understand Stuft’s following. In the Coachella Valley Independent’s 2024–2025 poll, it placed third for pizza and second for happy hour. In the following 2025–2026 edition, it again placed third for pizza, while finishing fourth for happy hour.^{6, 7}

These are reader preferences within specific categories, rather than measurements of sales or market share. They support describing Stuft as a longtime local favorite without assigning it an unsupported rank among all valley restaurants.

Taken together, the documented history suggests several reasons for that staying power: a recognizable pizza tradition, a menu that accommodates different tastes, investment in the dining environment and continuing local relationships. That is an interpretation of the record, rather than a single proven formula for success.

Visit the desert chapter

The La Quinta restaurant is at 78015 Main Street; the Palm Desert location is at 72840 Highway 111, Suite 465. Find both in the DOI Stuft Pizza place guide, which links to current menus and branch information.

For context around the La Quinta location, read Old Town La Quinta Explained. The tile roofs and patios in these photographs belong to a larger downtown setting, with its own layers of development and history. Stuft’s family story is one part of what gives that setting its character.