Sqirl Starts Serving a New Dinner Menu

On February 19, the night Sqirl debuted its first dinner service, owner Jessica Koslow was tossing a pot of popcorn back and forth at millennial cookware brand Our Place in Venice, an hour’s drive to the west of her Virgil Village restaurant. She was there to promote avocado oil and beef tallow brand Marianne’s, and to dole out bites of buttery beet agnolotti, which Sqirl began serving that evening as part of its new dinner menu. Was she feeling nervous? Anxious?

“I’m just tired,” she said. Then, right at 9 p.m., she rushed out to return east to her once-lauded jam company and groundbreaking Los Angeles restaurant, the place that has defined her career — and much of Los Angeles — for 15 years.

Koslow and Sqirl have been on an incredible journey. The restaurant launched a revolution in daytime dining, popularizing trends — tonics, vegetable-centric grain bowls, swoon-worthy brioche toast — that are now mainstays in Los Angeles. In a lengthy Eater profile from 2016, writer Marian Bull described Sqirl as “quirky, punky, small-but-scrappy,” which was apt. But Sqirl was also, for a moment, the most famous restaurant in Los Angeles, achieving greatness by reimagining familiar ingredients and putting smiles on faces with effortlessly simple dishes rooted in complex fermentation. The lines stretching out the door were infamous.

Everyone had an opinion about Sqirl because Los Angeles’s restaurant scene revolved around it — which set up the restaurant for its fall from grace. In summer 2020, former staffers revealed mold in buckets of the brand’s iconic fruit preserves, which went viral on social media. The fiasco, later dubbed JamGate, spun into several sub-controversies over whether Koslow had mistreated staff and sufficiently credited contributors to the brand’s recipes. Sqirl’s reckoning was swift, strong, and lasting.

Some in the restaurant industry and food media condemned and abandoned Koslow (though she was never entirely shut out of coverage), and attention shifted to other LA cafes like Great White (which had its own social media reckoning) and Hilltop Kitchen (co-owned by actress Issa Rae), among others. Sqirl mostly plugged along, continuing to serve bowls of sorrel pesto rice and plates of jam-covered ricotta brioche toast. The brunch lines eventually returned, even if not quite as long as they once were.

Strong feelings have lingered in food circles over the last five years. The new dinner service could bring some people back around to Koslow’s particular brand of modern California cuisine. But — as some comments on Eater’s recent video about Sqirl show — others may not see a new menu as a resolution for past wrongs or reason enough to reengage. (The ethics around dining at Sqirl are sticky, and the arguments for and against her absolution are many. You can read more about that debate in the Kang Town newsletter.)

While Sqirl’s daytime menu launched a revolution, the team is playing it safe for dinner, focusing on the same streak of top-notch ingredients — farmers-market produce, sustainably raised meats — now packaged in bistro fare. Nearly every bite manages to feel refreshingly tasty, but none of it is earth-shattering.

A hotel soap-sized bar of chicken liver covered with bright green celery butter was made to be spread on crusty grilled sourdough. An aggressively seasoned Caesar salad uses croissant pieces as croutons. The beet agnolotti balances sweet, savory, and rich with a subtle smokiness. Local black cod aged in kombu comes encircled in dill-flecked whey butter with pops of salty trout roe. Koji-cured roast chicken swims in umami-riddled bagna cauda, flanked by a punchy, slightly bitter swiss chard panzanella.

The restaurant itself has transformed in some ways to facilitate the transition from day to night. The next-door Sqirl Away space — a huge fully licensed kitchen and retail area selling cheese, wine, and more — assists the main hot line in the small original space. In place of the daytime line of diners, a host stand takes in patrons with reservations to be seated in Sqirl’s main room. The jam jars are tucked in shelves underneath the counter, as if Koslow is burying the past (though she says the brand still produces 40,000 organic-certified jars annually).

But in other ways, the setup is still the scrappy Sqirl of old, for better or worse; counter seating and an eight-top communal table, which made Sqirl’s daytime service charming, might not have the same effect in the evenings, when diners expect a modicum of creature comforts for the roughly $120 they’re paying for dinner.

In an opening story on Resy, Koslow explained that she always wanted to expand into dinner service, but it took the pandemic-era Restaurant Beverage Program to allow the 800-square-foot restaurant to gain a full liquor license. That license took four years, followed by more delays due to wildfires, ICE raids across the city, and staffing.

Prior to JamGate, every publication would’ve been vying to break the news of this new dinner service. Now, Koslow’s media approach has mostly been low-key, letting the food speak for itself. Despite some negative comments on social media, it seems as if a groundswell of support may come to meet her. Former Time Out LA editor Patricia Kelly Yeo published a long look at Sqirl’s dinner on her Substack, there’s positive chatter on local forum Food Talk Central, former Rustic Canyon chef Jeremy Fox hailed it as one of the best meals he’s had “in a long time,” and Garrett Snyder of the Infatuation listed the chorizo-shrimp stuffed squids (aka Sqimps) among the best things he ate in February.

That doesn’t mean Koslow is ignoring the past. In the Resy post, she was intentional about shouting out collaborators, as if responding to past allegations, and keen Redditors have pointed out that checks at the restaurant come with a statement about prioritizing health care for staff members, cheekily adding, “because without our staff, you would’ve had no idea what lacto fermentation was.”

After years of outsized attention on Sqirl, both good and bad, this slow restart feels like an appropriate new beginning. Nothing on the menu feels revolutionary, but it’s also not trying to be.

Koslow and co have a knack for California cooking, and it’s foolish to underestimate her sensibilities (and her team’s) when it comes to crafting truly amazing bites. Any Sqirl fan can recall the refreshing balance of cold ricotta, sweet summery jam, and buttered toast that launched the restaurant into the stratosphere. Sqirl’s dinner menu may or may not propel the restaurant back into the national conversation, but beet agnolotti feels like a solid first step.