Sorrel Pesto Rice Bowl — Everything I Want to Eat (2016)

Sqirl's moldy jam, and boom and bust in LA

In 2011, I started a jam company called Sqirl in a timy corner space on the edge of Los Angeles’s Silver Lake neighborhood. At first it was just me and one employee. Ty Songer, squirrelling away to the sounds of Sonic Youth’s “Jams Run Free” on volume LOUD. We had daily jam sessions. The following year, when I expanded Sqirl into a café, I wasn’t sure people would find me. The sidewalk in front is in rough shape. There is no convenient place to park, which, in LA, matters al ot. And yet, people do come.

They begin their days with an almond milk cappuccino or fresh-pressed turmeric tonic. They stop by for lunch and order a wedge of daily quiche, sorrel pesto rice bowl with fixings, or maybe some kabbouleh (see page 85) to go, if they are in a rush. In the afternoon, they come for our rotating selection of baked goods: from the pillow-soft Valrhona fleur de sel cookies to the malva pudding cakes with oozy insides and crystallized crusts. Depending on the season, they might find spiced apple butter, strawberry rose geranium, preserves, or Blenheim apricot jam to take home in a jar or, if they prefer, to enjoy spread over a slab of brioche toast.

…I started with jam because, well, it was what my budget allowed for. I paid myself very little and put everything back into the pot, knowing that one day I wanted to have something more than jam. When that day came, I knew that what I made had to flow with jam. Breakfast and lunch fit the bill. Jam and raw bar? Not necessarily the closest match.

…I live in LA, where everyone is known to be obsessively health-conscious and where dietary restrictions are the norm. People are always coming into Sqirl and ordering dishes with all sorts of substitutions and modifications—hold the feta, please, add extra kale.

In many ways the food at Sqirl actually suits this style of eating. The Sorrel Pesto Rice Bowl (page 63), for instance, is made up of a foundation of brown rice tossed in sorrel pesto, and it comes topped with preserved Meyer lemon, a silky poached egg, just a dab of lactofermented jalapeño hot sauce, and French sheep’s milk feta, plus watermelon radish for both crunch and garnish. But you don’t have to have all those things on your rice bowl if you don’t want them. You can get it vegan by ordering “The Stella” (named after my buddy Stella Mozgawa). I like to add kale to mine, but others may tack on avocado, breakfast sausage, cured bacon, or prosciutto. You can imagine the ticket calls “R2 Meat Lover’s with kale and avocado, no feta, hot on side.” It happens. — Jessica Koslow

Were Jessica Koslow and the mysterious “Ty Songar” randomly listening to a deep cut on a minor but well reviewed (7.5!) late-period Sonic Youth album, or did Koslow Google “songs with various fruit preserves in the title” and force Songar to stir a big pot of worryingly lukewarm jam to a discordant playlist of Michael Jackson, The Flaming Lips, and Technotonic? Knowing how meticulous Koslow was about her flavors and aesthetics, and how good she was at self-mythologizing, I doubt anything was left up to chance.

The magic of Sqirl was making you (as a customer) feel sure that your day was about to be a successful one. I moved to LA in 2013 with hopes of being a TV comedy writer. I knew a handful of people who made the seamless jump from “volunteer basement sketch writer” to “person who is actually paid to make television” and thought, well, if they can do it so can I. When I moved here, Sqirl was the chicest breakfast place in the universe. Coming from New York, where breakfast was either a bacon egg and cheese and a sugar-free Redbull (Mon-Fri), diner coffee / overcooked Greek omelette / undercooked potatoes (Sat), or bottomless drag queen mimosa-hollandaise brunch (the Lord’s day), Sqirl was Wonka’s fucking chocolate factory. I really only ever got two things there, the sorrel pesto rice bowl or the ricotta toast. We’ll get to the rice bowl shortly, but I want to briefly talk about that toast.

Dave Franco me casually sipping a cold brew

It was on the thickest slice of brioche legally allowed under the RBG Supreme Court. It was slathered first with a layer of creamy-tart fresh ricotta, and then topped with Technicolor, fruit-forward, seasonally appropriate jam. It was no less a sugar-rush than a jelly donut or the French toast at Odessa on Avenue A (the Sqirl of the ‘00s if you ask me), but it felt nourishing, even virtuous. It represented Los Angeles as I wanted to see it.

A month after I moved to LA, I submitted sketches I had written in New York (to absolutely no fanfare) to the Upright Citizens Brigade theater, and was immediately put on one of their house teams. This is easy, I thought. Like ingenues Faye Greener and Betty Elms before me, I was going to make it.

famously, all of her dreams came true

same here

Sqirl became a local sensation after a Jonathan Gold rave in the LA Times. Koslow was suddenly the smiling face of a new LA restaurant boomtime, and Silverlake (it’s one word, sorry Jess) became the neighborhood avatar for upwardly mobile creative success. In 2014, 415 new television shows made it to air. Some of them, like Stephen Falk’s You’re The Worst and Judd Apatow’s Love, were even about TV writers living in Silverlake! I didn’t have a TV writing job quite yet, but my sketch team was knocking it out of the park, and I got the opportunity to submit my packet to SNL. Not bad after less than a year in LA.

By 2015, Sqirl was getting written up in The New York Times (which, at the time, didn’t often have many nice things to say about LA restaurants). Mark Bittman wrote:

That is some wickedly conceived breakfast food. I would say that Koslow and I are culinary soul mates, but given the popularity of the place, it’s clear that I’m not the only one. This is food whose time has come.

All of a sudden, LA, with innovative restaurants like Sqirl and a boom in TV production facilitated by the ascendent streaming services’ need for content, was becoming the center of both American culture and American food.

In 2015 mama was working.

In 2016, Koslow took a victory lap and published Everything I Want to Eat: Sqirl and the New California Cooking. It’s a beautiful book, and it should be, as it retailed for $40. The food is meticulously arranged and photographed on stark white backgrounds, so the colors pop off the page. Koslow’s famous regulars: Dave, Busy, etc., grace the pages of what, save a few dozen recipes, looks more like a fashion magazine than a cookbook. I was still plugging along between my ricotta toasts and grain-bowls. Even though my sketch team had flamed out, I started a podcast and wrote a TV pilot with one of my former teammates, and we soon (to my delighted surprise) found ourselves repped by one of the big talent agencies.

We were writing more pilots, pitching ourselves to various B-list networks and production companies around town, and I felt one break away from achieving my goal. Koslow was also riding high, being called “The Genius of Jam” by the Times’ weekly girlboss column (it was literally called “Like a Boss”) and planning on expansion. Sqirl Santa Monica tomorrow, Sqirl New York next week, and Sqirl (Écurl?) Paris bientôt?

Then the pandemic happened, and gravity set in. I got off easy, gently fired by my agents after turning in a half-hour comedic contemporary adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country. (It’s actually pretty good, if any discerning showrunners are reading). Jessica’s downfall was a little more public. Picture it, July 2020. Thug Kitchen finally capitulated to the woke mob and changed its name to “Bad Manners” (not quite the same ring), Adam Rapoport was drummed out of Bon Appetit after his brownface photo (“#TBT me and my papi,” never forget) and the systemic pay disparity of his employees of color became widely known. But the food world needed a newer, younger, hotter villain, and a little fellow named Clostridium Botulinum came to the rescue.

The origins of the “Mold Pic Smelled ‘Round The World” are a little murky. I’ll try to summarize as concisely as possible. Respected food writer (and recent Substack defector) Alicia Kennedy tweeted (I checked, she deleted it years ago) something cryptic about knowing an explosive secret related to Sqirl. Then, freelance food whistleblower and alleged (by me) crazy person Joe Rosenthal started cold calling every Sqirl employee he could find, sharing anonymous comments about Koslow’s lax food-safety protocols from various disgruntled workers. Next (here’s where the order of events gets a little fuzzy), either Rosenthal shared this photo on his Instagram stories directly from a source, or he shared it after it was posted on Twitter by someone with the handle @hanaymoi. Either way, because stories go away after 24 hours, it was the Twitter post that went really viral.

Mona Lisa-level iconic

Seemingly, nobody who worked for Koslow wanted to defend her. Many employees claimed that Koslow had a secret, unlicensed jam-making facility unknown to food inspectors where she could store the moldy preserves without fear of legal repercussions. A fungus among us indeed. Aside from the widespread food safety transgressions, there were allegations of stealing credit for recipes, particularly from her employees of color. Atwater Village’s own Ria Dolly Barbosa is the real developer of Koslow’s famous sorrel pesto rice bowl (see, I told you we would eventually get back to the rice bowl). From a July 24, 2020 interview in The Land:

She says one day, Koslow expressed a desire for a dish with sorrel, preserved lemons, brown rice, and feta. Barbosa suggested they use a sorrel pesto instead of cutting up the leafy greens. “I said, ‘If we turn it into pesto, you get flavor throughout,'” Barbosa recalled. The result was the Sorrel Pesto Bowl, one of Sqirl’s best-known dishes.

“Sqirl was kind of like the first huge heartbreak because a lot of that was my intellectual property and things that I spent hours and days testing and trying,” Barbosa says.

So, it seems like there was a lot of mismanagement on many levels at Sqirl. And Koslow was oblivious at best and dishonest at worst about properly crediting her staff for their successful dishes. But it was the mold that nobody could stop talking about.

Koslow’s first response was defensive, excusing the jam’s mold growth due to its “low sugar” content.

Soon, she had to be a bit more contrite, officially changing Sqirl’s jam-making method. She doesn’t ever apologize though.

Oh God, the sorrel pesto rice bowl. I’m getting to it. I’ve ordered it at Sqirl several times (not since the whole thing went down obviously), and I’d made a version at home over the years too. The sorrel idea (whether it came from Jessica, Ria, or whoever) is genius because sorrel has a unique tartness that cuts through all the heaviness (olive oil, feta, egg, avocado, optional meat). A traditional basil pesto, or even a parsley pesto, wouldn’t provide the needed acidic contrast.

naughty naughty bacon

So, if you’re going to make one, figure out where you can get some sorrel. I’m lucky that Kenter Canyon Farms at the Atwater farmers market always seems to have it (probably because Sqirl made it so damn popular). So don’t sub the sorrel, and don’t sub the medium grain brown rice for a basmati or something. You want rice that doesn’t break down or lose its shape, even after mixing in the pesto and (if you’re like me and are eating it all week for lunch) spending days in the fridge. You definitely don’t have to spring for Kokuho Rose rice. Tsuru Mai is grown by the same company and cost $5.49 for a 5lb bag at my local Super King.

I used Bulgarian feta instead of French ($3.99/lb at Super King), normal radishes instead of watermelon, fresh dill, bottled hot sauce (El Machete’s Marie Sharp’s-like Insurgente) and regular old lemon zest and juice. Here’s a confession: I don’t like preserved lemons, and I think Meyer lemons are overrated. If I want lemon, I want it tart, not weirdly funky or mildly sweet. On Monday, I did fry up an egg (I’m not poaching in the middle of a work day, sorry) and added it to the bowl. But, I try to keep my egg consumption to a minimum (Ashkenazi cholesterol curse), so the rest of the week I subbed green lentils and Trader Joe’s dill pickle mini falafels for protein. I also threw in a few cherry tomatoes, because I need to eat fresh tomatoes every day during the summer. Oh, and some roasted broccoli and a bunch of arugula.

Friday’s bowl is loving and giving

After the pandemic, the strikes, the fires, the consolidation of streaming companies, and various other collective disasters over the past half-decade, the number of new TV shows airing each year is about 25% of what it was in 2014. I’m happy to be out of the racket, though I do have a handful of scripts lying around (a sweeping ‘30s Hollywood soap opera taking place at the inception of the Hays Code; a sitcom about a gay love triangle between a cokehead yoga teacher, a Mayor Pete-like politician, and a closeted ex-teen heartthrob; I can keep going if you want get on a call.) Koslow, notably, is not out of her racket, though her ambitions surely are diminished. Sqirl is still open 8-4 every day, though there are no longer lines out the door. I haven’t been to Sqirl in my current, post-pandemic, post-repped-TV writer form. I still love Los Angeles, but I don’t have as many illusions (delusions?) about my place in it. Koslow’s aesthetically rigid, sunny optimism seems hopelessly naive, and I’m more than happy to just have yogurt with blueberries and bran flakes for breakfast. I did recently buy a jar of Sqirl jam (Warren pear and passionfruit) at McCall’s, for old time’s sake. It was $13 and underwhelming. The moment, more than likely, has passed.