Daniel Patterson and Sarah Lewitinn wanted their new Los Angeles restaurant to be a gourmet restaurant with party favors. So at Jacaranda, which will open in the Hancock Park neighborhood on Wednesday, May 6, a married couple has a six-seat communal table for guests who are inclined to make new friends.
Patterson wants to rethink the tradition of the tasting menu at the 30-seat restaurant. And one thing Lewitinn noticed at the Jaca Social Club, the predecessor to the Jacaranda he and Patterson ran from their home in Hancock Park, was the demand for solo diners.
Jacaranda, at its core, is a love story. And like all love stories, it’s about new beginnings. Patterson earned two Michelin stars at San Francisco’s Coi before moving to Los Angeles and focusing on social entrepreneurship. LocoL again Alta. Lewitinn, aka Ultragrrrlwas an influential New York City music fan and DJ who helped shape the scene as bands like The Strokes, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Interpol took over.
Levitinn met with Patterson in early 2021. He asked her out on a date and later proposed. They got married in 2022. Patterson asked him to jump in and build a restaurant together.
At Jacaranda, Patterson, chef Andrew Miller and pastry chef Matt Tinder cook with the same level of precision, technique and attention to detail that they did at Coi. But Patterson wants Jacaranda to “feel like Los Angeles culturally.” So he’s been foraging, hitting farmer’s markets and exploring the wonders of plants.
Much of Patterson’s cooking at Jacaranda, which offers 10-course, $295 tasting menus, is deceptively simple. It looks like food you can make at home, but then you take a step back and notice the details and you realize that you are in a completely different place. During the Jacaranda preview at the end of April, we ate an asparagus plant that was cooked and cooled in its juice. It tasted more like asparagus than any asparagus we’ve ever had.
A bowl of about a dozen grilled green vegetables was served with a green juice made from yerba santa and nopales. (This dish was inspired by the vegetarian aguachile Patterson made in 2017 at a collaborative dinner with Taco Maria chef/Coi alum Carlos Salgado.)
“I was going out with a foodie and learning more about traditional ingredients,” Patterson told the Observer. “I got yerba santa, and it just blew me away. It didn’t smell like anything I’m used to. It was like, sweet and gummy, almost like bubble gum. I was like, ‘Fuck, this is amazing.’ But then I had to find a way to extract the flavor without extracting the bitterness. And so what I ended up doing was just putting it in cold water for 36 hours. Then I found out that you can add more water and make it again, and you have stock.”
Finding, clarifying, amplifying, measuring, reducing, reconstructing, reconsidering. Patterson and his team aim for nothing less than a unique experience as they create dishes such as soft tofu with fresh seaweed and caviar. They carefully consider time and temperature as they slice and serve the pepper-crusted duck with a green salad garnished with crackers and duck bone broth. They start the meal with small hand-held bites like a yuba roll (filled with kelp and mushrooms and resembling a bonbon because Patterson was inspired by the shape of the Tootsie Roll) that is steamed before service and brought to near room temperature. Tinder has a dessert with raw chocolate, roasted kelp and dates that gave us a combination of flavors we’ve never had but also somehow reminded us of the fun of eating s’mores. There are many neat tricks like these in Jacaranda.
Patterson remains as community-focused as ever, and wants Jacaranda to be a pipeline to fine dining in communities that lack good food. He and Alta chef Keith Corbin continue to use LocoL in Watts as a skills training program that addresses food insecurity. Patterson has two employees at Jacaranda who came out of that program, and Corbin himself is a reminder of how those who were incarcerated can succeed in kitchens and still run a restaurant.
Patterson and Lewitinn look forward to the day when employees leave to start their own businesses. But they also know that one good thing about the restaurant industry is how different people can find a good reason to get together again.
“We’ve known each other for 15 years,” Patterson tells the Observer as he talks about his relationship with Miller and Tinder. “We were talking about it. Maybe between us there is 100 years of experience. No kitchen of this size has such power, but also, like a kind of ESP for each other, because we know each other well.”
For Patterson, food is about relationships, more than anything else.
“People connection has always been the most important thing,” he says. “Food is about people. Cooking is an act of generosity. Besides sex, it’s the most human thing you can do with another person. And something that creates many memories with our family, and our friends when we go out. There is something very tangible and sensitive about that. So that’s kind of staying, like, a superstition to me called, Sarah. But I have this other restaurant.
Lewitinn has spent the intervening years hosting raucous, decibel-shattering shows and parties, and Jacaranda has been set back to quiet, although the restaurant’s playlist includes punk and indie-rock tunes suggested by guests.
“I told Daniel that I know a lot of people, but I don’t really know them,” Lewitinn told the Observer. “In all these years I’ve been doing music and the club scene, there were a lot of conversations that took place in loud rooms between drinks, makeup and dancing. Entering the food industry was the first opportunity I’ve had in a long time to sit with people and talk to them and have long conversations.”
Still, Lewitinn knows that being a host is about engagement and disengagement.
“One of the things I used to do a lot when I threw parties was that if I knew that I would be busy and someone would come to greet me, I would close the room and find someone who I think will communicate well and bring them,” he said. “I was letting them know, so they would start talking to me and I could go and do my things.”
In her new role in the restaurant industry, she is “always trying to find people who can be friends with each other.” When I visited Jaca Social Club a few months ago, I was the lone diner at a table of these fast friends. As dinner wrapped up, two couples at the table decided to go somewhere else to get a nightcap together. The end was the beginning.
Jacaranda is located at 6623 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles, CA, and will be open for dinner Wednesday-Saturday and lunch on Sunday.
