Beloved Palm Springs restaurateur and DAP Health major donor Liz Ostoich has a four-letter-word philosophy for living life: LOVE.
Words by Daniel Vaillancourt (as seen in DAP Health magazine)
When Liz Ostoich was 11, she’d regularly walk up to Liberace’s Palm Springs home — the one with the big L on the gate — and ring the doorbell. Every time, the legendary entertainer’s housekeeper would come out, and Ostoich would inquire, “Is Liberace home?” Every time, the reply would be, “Just one minute. Let me check.”
The housekeeper would disappear, emerging moments later with an autographed photo. Over a few years, Ostoich collected more than 20 of these, each of them a different black and white shot, but all personally inscribed “To Liz, Liberace xo.”
“I fancied myself an actress, singer, dancer, and all that,” says Ostoich today. “I’m sure it was the entertainment part of the whole thing that drew me to him.” But collecting those 8 x 10 glossies also represented rare moments of joy for the woman born and raised in Riverside in 1967 as Elizabeth Ann Ashley, an “oops” baby whose two older siblings were preteens.
Her father had taken the family back to his native Indiana when Ostoich was 4, and returned her and her mother to California by the time she was 11, thanks to “the seven worst winters he’d ever seen.” By then, a permanent frost had also settled on her parents’ marriage.
“My dad moved us back, then left home,” recalls Ostoich. “My brother and sister left to get married. So now, we were down to just me and my mom, and I was pretty vulnerable.”
A male teacher chose to take advantage of that vulnerability and molested Ostoich. The act — not to mention the entire legal proceeding that ensued — further traumatized her, leaving deep wounds.
Feeling and fearing she could be deserted and/or hurt by anyone at any time, Ostoich developed major abandonment and trust issues. Longing to be loved and protected, she followed her high school sweetheart to the University of Utah. When that relationship did nothing to fill the void inside of her, Ostoich terminated it and applied to law school.
“I felt I needed to take care of myself because I didn’t trust anybody,” she says. “I needed to make sure I would be OK, and that was the safest route I could take. I was a creative person — I really wanted to be an actress — but instead of following my dream, I had all these fears of failing. I thought, ‘I’m smart. I can take care of myself that way.’”
By the time she was accepted to Pepperdine University in Malibu, Ostoich had moved on to fellow U of U undergrad Chad Bianco, an athlete who harbored his own dreams of pro baseball, but who chose to abandon them to follow his fiancée to California.
In hindsight, Ostoich freely admits that — still needing to fill that hole in her heart — she too hastily settled on Bianco. “He wasn’t the right man for me, and I wasn’t the right woman for him,” she says. “But within six weeks of starting to date, we were engaged. Within nine months, we were married. I was barely 22. He was 21. We were so young. And I was so needy. I just wanted to be with someone who wouldn’t betray me.”
They had two sons, now aged 30 and 34, but after six years, Ostoich filed for divorce on irreconcilable differences grounds. “My ex-husband is a person of controversy,” she says of the man who today is the divisive Riverside County Sheriff, adding she feels no ill will toward him despite being criticized for their history. “Our failure was not his fault. It was mine. We were — and still are — just completely different people. But I can’t completely reject him, because he’s the father of my children. I won’t hurt my kids like that.”
That’s why Ostoich once hosted a 2018 fundraiser for Bianco at the home she shares with her current husband of 26 years, fellow lawyer Mark Ostoich. It’s another sore point with many of her detractors. “We’ve never been Trump supporters — we’ve never given even a dollar to Trump!” insists the political moderate in an effort to dispel persistent rumors. “I divorced Chad 27 years ago. At what point does that not matter anymore? What did you do 35 years ago, that you ended 27 years ago because that isn’t who you are today?”
In Mark, Ostoich found someone not only compatible but kind and solid. He’s the one who told her to quit her law career once it became clear it had never fulfilled her. He’s also the one who, in 2016, convinced her to take over the restaurant FARM in Palm Springs’ historic La Plaza — where she was a regular — when the previous owner had a vision that Ostoich should become its new proprietress.
“Mark said, ‘You can trust me,’” recalls Ostoich, which is what she’d been yearning to hear all her life. “It was very emotional for me because I realized that, until that moment, I’d never trusted anyone. It’s the wind beneath your wings moment. He gave me the freedom to realize I didn’t have to be afraid. We had each other’s back.”
And so, Ostoich embraced reinventing herself as a restaurateur with gusto, making FARM a smashing success that spawned similar triumphs in 2019’s Michelin Guide-recommended Tac/Quila, and 2022’s The Front Porch and Clandestino. “It’s the one thing I try to teach young people today,” she says. “To push through and be brave. Usually, the bad things we conjure up in our minds are just that — of our own making — and 99% of the time, they don’t happen.”
At each eatery, Ostoich is not only intimately involved with what lands on the menu, but with the establishment’s aesthetic — selecting everything from artwork and flooring to the texture and color of linens, glassware, and flatware. It’s in these hundreds of little details that Ostoich lets the artistic side of her run free. It also gives each restaurant its distinctive flair.
All this, of course, with the unbridled support of Mark, in whom Ostoich also found someone who shares her deep faith. “We both believe man has ruined the image of God,” she says, adding that this joint distaste for organized religion led them, in 2017, to create a weekly meeting for believers in their home.
“Every Sunday, I make breakfast, Mark leads Bible study, and friends play music and sing,” she continues, adding that attendees run the gamut: gay, straight, young, old, conservative and liberal, moneyed and not. Many people are from the recovery community. One person is a former gang member/drug dealer.
“I’ve known Liz and Mark for many years and consider them both valued friends,” says DAP Health Chief of Brand Marketing Steve Henke. “What I admire most is how they lead by example, putting their faith into action by helping the most vulnerable. I’ll never forget the evening I was invited to FARM when it was closed to the public. Liz and Mark — along with their invited friends and family — served more than 30 unhoused people. They give to our community quietly and with humility — not because it’s good for their business, but because it’s the right thing to do.”
“The thing people don’t realize about us is that 90% of our donations have been to charities,” Ostoich reveals, rattling off the Human Rights Campaign, the Palm Springs Gay Softball League, the Palm Springs Plaza Theatre Foundation, and DAP Health as some of their favorites. “We’re not political people. We’re people people.”
Because they feel strongly that health care is a basic human right everyone should have access to, all four restaurants in their empire have always enthusiastically participated in Dining Out For Life, the annual international foodie fundraising event that has garnered millions since 1991 for local HIV/AIDS service organizations. The amount earned on that one day and night each year is in part what makes it possible for DAP Health to continue its 40-year legacy of protecting and expanding health care access for all people.
In 2023 and 2024, Ostoich — whose eateries donate 50% of their gross daily and nightly tally — was the top fundraiser for DAP Health. She can therefore lay claim to helping the organization and Dining Out For Life Greater Palm Springs perennially place in the top three markets, besting such higher-populated cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York. Not that Ostoich is seeking credit. “We love our community,” she says simply. “We just want everybody to feel the love we feel.”
As for herself, Ostoich has done much soul-searching of late. “What I feel is that I’m not who I was at 11 when I was abandoned,” she concludes. “I’m not who I was at 15 when I was molested, or at 22 when I married the wrong man. I’m not even who I was yesterday. I’m 57, and I’m here. And there’s no shame in my journey. There’s no shame in anyone’s journey. Where we stand today is a beautiful amalgamation of everything we’ve gone through, everything we’ve survived. And there is profound grace in that.”
(Additional reporting by Maggie Downs.)
