Feed Me: West Coast 🌴

Sqirl, Horses, Lemonade, and the Napa estate built on Two-Buck Chuck.

Buongiorno, everyone.

Today in Feed Me: J Lee reviews Sqirl’s new dinner menu, Jeffrey Deitch talks new LACMA and The Art Parade, a rumor about the re-opening of Horses, and Anna Wintour threw a party in San Francisco as rumors of Vogue World’s 2027 location swirl. Thank you Madeleine Mogul for being Feed Me’s assist on West Coast editions of the Water Cooler.

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For our next Guest Lecture, paid readers can ask LA mayoral candidate Nithya Raman anything they want. See you in the Feed Me chat.

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A sad end to a short dinner at Sqirl. By J Lee.

Expense Account is a series on Feed Me by semi-anonymous restaurant critic J Lee. He hosts a podcast with the same name. Today, he wrote about Sqirl’s new-ish dinner menu.

I’m in LA to eat at Sqirl. I’m a millennial, I’m always in LA to eat at Sqirl. Sqirl to me is LA. Sqirl to me might be the defining restaurant of my aging generation. The Lena Dunham of restaurants. And now after 15 years, Sqirl, the famous breakfast and lunch restaurant, the inventor of toast and jam and colorful beverages, is finally serving dinner. I love to believe that an old dog can learn new tricks. We will see. This spring, I spent a full day eating at Sqirl. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

“We started with a round of ‘mini martinis,’ a restaurant after my heart. What arrived were normal sized martini glasses that looked as if they’d been carried through a crowded bar and spilled. They were about a quarter full. A mini martini in a normal sized martini glass is such a sad sight. They don’t stay cold, and they make you feel like a beast, a tragic way to start a meal.”

The last time I visited LA, a decade ago, Sqirl was the most important restaurant in the world, to me at least. What a radical idea, that porridge, toast, and rice bowls are what you want, they’re what you need, and they also could even be celebratory, and celebrated. Sqirl taught me that food could be colorful, bright, unapologetically feminine, a little silly, even ridiculous, while still being rigorous and delicious. The food at Sqirl has always been joy-forward, food you eat with your eyes and your mouth, and your phone. Your phone eats first sometimes and that’s ok. It was the early days of Instagram, and I have vivid memories of seeing that jam and ricotta toast all over the app, and feeling sick with jealousy. This was my earliest memory of food-related social-media-induced fomo, little did I know that this would be the first of many such instances. I knew that this was a moment, and I needed to be there. And when I finally got to experience it IRL, it did not disappoint. To think that back then waiting in a massive line for food felt like a novel experience. How far we’ve come.

I’ve long thought of Jessica Koslow as one of the great visionary chefs of our time. You can see her influence on a generation of cuteass daytime cafes that now exist in basically every city around the world. We can talk about gentrification, and the commodification of gruel, but by and large, these Sqirl-inspired cafes have been a net positive for the world at large, at least in my opinion. Koslow understands the internet, and, beginning in 2012, captured the zeitgeist, in a way that few chefs have. From her flavors, to her strong use of color, all of the Sqirl design language, custom plates with stretched out typefaces, to the name itself, Sqirl. Singular, recognizable, googleable, and built for broadcast. Chef as creative director. Koslow created a brand, a little world, out of a tiny storefront on the edge of Silver Lake. It was perfect, maybe too perfect, of course the haters came. There was a well-documented fall from grace, that in the scope of things, and with some hindsight, all feels a bit quaint. I have to say, moldgate never bothered me. Sometimes jam gets moldy, who cares, grow up. 2020 was a wild time.