Sqirl, at the height of its fame, was one of those places where tourists, particularly from New York, came to both understand and misunderstand Los Angeles.
They waited for fat, airy slices of toasted brioche, loaded with soft ricotta and rainbow-striped with jams. They treated all kinds of hangovers with sorrel pesto rice bowls and found themselves wondering who they might be if they wore supple canvas jackets, got more sun on their skin, ate more farmers’ market fruit.
If only every morning could be like this one, sitting on the sidewalk (in February!) as the pink trumpet trees bloomed, sipping on a freshly pressed turmeric and ginger tonic.
Jessica Koslow’s scrappy, healthy-presenting and then suddenly famous all-day cafe in Virgil Village, a neighborhood on the edge of Silver Lake, became shorthand for the fresh-faced California cuisine that Los Angeles exported throughout the 2010s.
It was breezily unconfined by just one culture or tradition, highlighting short-lived produce seasons, building layers upon layers of acidity, often through zany fermentations. (It probably says something that tourists are now more likely to make food pilgrimages to the luxury grocery chain Erewhon for a bland, corporate vision of goopy Los Angeles maximalism.)
Most restaurants start with dinner and then, maybe, eventually, open up for weekend brunch. But Sqirl made its name with breakfast, an ideal vehicle for Ms. Koslow’s jams. Ms. Koslow started her jam business, Sqirl Confitures, in 2011, selling at local farmers’ markets, bringing together flavors like blueberry and tarragon, apricots and cherries, raspberry and hibiscus. She opened Sqirl in 2012, but only started dinner service this past February.
Sandra Felix is Sqirl’s chef de cuisine, Guillermo Mendez is the executive sous chef and Ms. Koslow works services throughout the week in the open kitchen. The dining room has a communal table in the center and some wavy tables along the wall where two people can fit comfortably if they’re not ordering too many things. There’s more seating on the patio and along the sidewalk, all dressed with green, Sqirl-branded stationery, tiny green pencils and rolled white cloth napkins.
The menu reads as eager, almost chatty, with some dish descriptions really putting it all out there for you. Though sometimes, this can be disappointing — why call the snap peas out in the big green salad if there are only going to be a couple of them hidden inside?
And do diners need to know, before they order it, that the shrimp-stuffed squid, called sqimps on the menu, are lacquered with liquid aminos and grilled over binchotan charcoal? Maybe not, but you see these annotations and get a sense of the dishes and the kitchen’s enthusiasm for ingredients and process.
The first time I ordered those sqimps, the little squid were cooked too long, charred beyond their edges and slightly parched, but the next it was all tenderness and delicate bounce; I could really enjoy the way they held onto the mellow saffron aioli and crunchy strips of sweet, almost mouthwatering fennel, which had been soaked as if to make nixtamal.
There was an unexpected lavishness to all of the cooking — cream, butter, cheese. The chicken liver is half celery butter, in a puddle of quince gastrique, and it comes with bread that’s been grilled, delightfully, in schmaltz.
So much of the food and the drinks on Sqirl’s dinner menu reworks classic dishes or combinations, but in a way that amplifies their defining features as well as their peculiarities. Steak tartare is often botched in its simplest form and tinkering with it can go bad so fast.
The version at Sqirl works — a mound of raw beef that’s generously dressed in a deeply smoky tonnato and covered with a snow of cured egg yolk. It comes with a dainty silver goblet of potato chips and each one can carry as much tartare as you dare to heap on.
You might not notice the handful of pale green unripe blueberries on the plate, juicy and faintly sour, and I’m not sure they add too much to such a deeply seasoned dish beyond sheer whimsy and delight. But Sqirl is microdosing you with whimsy and delight throughout dinner. The question is, do you want to receive it, or not?
Half the time the bread plate arrived with a puddle of wine-colored Jimmy Nardello pepper jam nested in butter, my fellow diners saw that jam, thick and red, and remembered a grim moment in 2020. Back then, Sqirl made national news after a former employee shared a stomach-turning photo with Joe Rosenthal, a mathematician in St. Paul, Minnesota, who runs a restaurant-focused Instagram account. It showed a bucket of Sqirl jam capped with thick, fuzzy mold and it was, unfortunately, unforgettable.
JamGate underscored how infuriating it was that even celebrated restaurants (especially celebrated restaurants) could be careless, and conceal that carelessness. And it went beyond a health-code violation: Former chefs from Sqirl’s kitchen claimed Ms. Koslow had taken credit for dishes they had developed and described working in a poorly ventilated prep space. For a while, combing through the details and commenting was something of a shared cultural experience.
It easily could have been the end for another restaurant, but Ms. Koslow, the chef and sole owner of Sqirl, didn’t “step away.” She apologized and explained how she would change her practices going forward, and over the last few years Sqirl has kept going as a less busy, but still busy place with new protocols and open kitchen spaces.
On a recent call, Ms. Koslow was quick to attribute the terrific avocado dip that came with the onion rings — described to me by a server as “ketchup without the tomatoes” — to Ms. Felix. She referred to Mr. Mendez as “a master of sauces.”
But the shadow of JamGate might be part of the reason dinner reservations are somewhat easy to come by, why walking in during the week is a safe move — a decade ago, this would have been unimaginable.
And there’s an intensity running through the whole menu that can feel like a response. A quarter cabbage appears like a deepwater fish, swimming in a silky, butter-rich yuzu sauce with an eye of treacly black garlic toum, its layers oozing with a witchy black purée of mushrooms. It is so elaborately constructed, pounding with flavor and texture, including that of the cabbage itself.
The two-toned agnolotti is rolled slightly too thick for the squidgy soft, but powerfully flavored beet butter inside, fiercely sweet and sour. You go from that to swiping some of the chicken thigh, marinated in koji, through a loud, but compelling pan sauce. From there to the side of brown rice and lentils, which looks like the kind of food I’d console myself with on a sick day, but is also somehow doing the most (the lentils are soaked and simmered in whey and the result is weirdly and wonderfully tangy).
I almost wished Sqirl could orchestrate a few more moments when this intensity was turned down, places to relax a little between the fullness of drippy funk and mouth-puckering sting and rich, sticky, lip-smacking sweetness.
The acidity and sweetness of the savory dishes were still soaring, bouncing off each other, when the Eton Mess arrived. Big enough to feed several people, with both fresh fruit and sweet-tart strawberry jam over a crispy meringue, it was a lot. But maybe it was also exactly right for a place that started with jam, that might have ended because of jam, to preserve itself now with more jam.
Cinematography by Stephen Tringali.
Tejal Rao, our chief critic based in Los Angeles, writes starred reviews of restaurants nationwide. Ligaya Mishan, our chief critic based in New York City, writes starred reviews of restaurants in New York and beyond. Briefer starred reviews of New York restaurants are written by our contributing critics Mahira Rivers and Ryan Sutton, and first appear weekly in the Where to Eat newsletter (subscribe here).
