The Buckshot Deli & Diner is an oasis along the sun-blasted California highway that runs from Calexico to Coachella, the only remaining restaurant in the desert hamlet of Niland.
The boxy diner with a red door and red trim strung with Christmas lights is named for the hunters who shoot ducks and geese near the southeastern shores of the Salton Sea. When Vicky Hernandez bought the restaurant about a dozen years ago, she kept the name and decor — a mounted deer head and geese hang from the ceiling above wood-paneled walls — and added handwritten signs advertising birria, tamales and other Mexican specialties.
