The origin story of the Los Angeles restaurant Sqirl is the stuff of a millennial fairy tale. In 2011, a woman named Jessica Koslow, just shy of thirty, ended a period of career indecision by starting a preserves company. (She’d oscillated between professional kitchens, mostly working in pastry, and TV production, including a stint at “American Idol.”) Koslow made her name at farmers’ markets and specialty shops, selling jars of jam in whimsical flavors such as raspberry-vanilla-bean and kumquat-chamomile. After a year, she moved into a tiny storefront in Virgil Village, a working-class, mostly Latino micro-neighborhood on the border of Silver Lake and East Hollywood. By 2013, the “sort-of cafe,” as the late L.A. Times food critic Jonathan Gold described it in an early, glowing review, drew daily lines down the block. Tourists and locals alike were willing to wait half an hour for the privilege of ordering what is now on the menu as “famed ricotta toast”—a fat slab of lightly griddled brioche slathered in creamy cheese and striped with rainbow dollops of jam—or a sorrel-pesto rice bowl, strewn with preserved Meyer lemon and topped with watermelon radish, feta, and a poached egg.

As is often true of gentrifying newcomers, Sqirl was thrillingly incongruous with its surroundings, a mix of low-slung apartment buildings, strip malls, and empty fenced-in lots. The menu, which had been designed to showcase Koslow’s preserves, found the midpoint of hippie health food and indulgent diner classics; it adapted California cuisine, exemplified by the militant locavorism of Chez Panisse, into something more arch, casual, and world-wise. Sqirl embodied a growing feeling, even among the most jaded New Yorkers, that L.A. could be a place of scrappy creative ferment, beckoning with streaming-era writers’ rooms and matcha lattes in the sunshine. In 2016, a writer for Eater declared it, in a seven-thousand-word feature, “the bastion of all things Californian and vegetable-forward and exciting and new”—and announced that she would soon be leaving Brooklyn for L.A.

For the first couple of months of the COVID pandemic, Sqirl, which had expanded across a few storefronts, fared as well as any restaurant could. A bigger upheaval arrived in July, a few weeks after Koslow posted, on Sqirl’s Instagram page, a pledge to donate one per cent of the restaurant’s gross sales to organizations that supported social-justice work, adding, “We stand with the Black community.” An anonymous commenter called it an empty gesture and accused Koslow of various misdeeds, from disparaging Virgil Village to neglecting the well-being of her employees, many of whom were people of color. As others chimed in with similar allegations, Joe Rosenthal, a mathematician and restaurant obsessive in St. Paul, Minnesota, who describes himself as a “food antagonist,” started sleuthing and sharing his findings. A former employee sent him a smoking gun: a photo of a ten-litre plastic bucket of glossy red jam blanketed in nightmarish, mosslike clumps of blue-green mold, which staff had apparently been instructed to scrape off before serving.

A mixture of moral outrage and lockdown angst turned #JamGate into national news. Koslow’s second cookbook, “The Sqirl Jam Book,” was published less than two weeks after the photo went viral; at the end of a paragraph about how to store homemade jam, she’d written, “You’ll know to toss it when you see mold.” Though food safety was a concern—a mycologist quoted in the L.A. Times noted that “spores can grow quite deep into a gel as they disperse”—the layer of rot also came to feel like a pointed metaphor. Multiple employees described being put to work in a poorly ventilated kitchen space that was hidden from health inspectors until the restaurant was renovated in 2018. Two of Sqirl’s former chefs de cuisine, Javier Ramos and Ria Barbosa, claimed that Koslow took credit for their efforts and ideas. In May, Koslow had been nominated for a James Beard Award, for Best Chef: California; other former employees argued that she didn’t spend enough time in the kitchen to qualify. People who had never eaten at Sqirl sent death threats and flooded its Yelp page with bad reviews. Koslow attempted, falteringly, to defend herself, and then to apologize, and then to promise to do better, but the damage was done. As far as the internet was concerned, she was cooked.

Or was she? Koslow closed the restaurant for a single day, “because we had people outside with signs and the team needed a mental-health day,” she told me recently. A major player in the industry advised her to shut down the business entirely, reasoning that she could never recover her reputation. “I think it was something I needed to hear at the time,” Koslow said, but, she’d concluded, “there’s nothing else I want to do.” For the next five years, the restaurant chugged along with new jam-storage protocols in place, and Koslow mostly kept a low profile—until last fall, when she announced that Sqirl would be extending its hours and débuting a dinner menu. In a Substack post that teased new dishes such as shima-aji crudo and chicken-liver mousse with celery butter, Koslow mentioned some ideas that didn’t make the cut, and emphasized the importance of making a “glorious misstep.” “Here’s the truth,” she wrote. “Getting it wrong is part of getting it right.”

Koslow, who is forty-four, grew up in Long Beach, California, the only child of a single mother, who is a dermatologist. Through college, Koslow figure skated competitively, a pursuit that seems less surprising the more time you spend with her. She carries herself with a sense of destiny; the only post on her personal Instagram page is a picture of her with the celebrity restaurateur Nancy Silverton, captioned, “A dreamlike photo of my current self speaking to my future self at dinner.” “I’m a person who gets very obsessed with a thing—I will watch a show seven times in a row, I will read a book seven times in a row,” Koslow told me. Lately, she’s been reading “a lot of Rick Rubin.” At one point, she suggested we go for a walk as we talked, an idea she’d gotten from Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, which she was listening to as an audiobook.

Koslow wears two lobster pendants around her neck, an homage to a crawfish that she saw in the L.A. River, last fall, while she was doing the Rosh Hashanah ritual of tashlik—casting away regrets by throwing stale bread into a body of water. She had read that a crawfish was a symbol of resilience. One gets the sense that Koslow’s tenacious striving extends to “doing the work,” or at least trying to. She cooks on the line at Sqirl several days a week, and, when she talks about the dinner menu, she is careful to credit her chef de cuisine, Sandra Felix, and her executive sous chef, Guillermo Mendez, for their contributions. She speaks adoringly of Jose (Saul) Parada, a Salvadoran man in his fifties who oversees all of Sqirl’s jam-making, which takes place in a bright, health-department-certified facility, of which she gave me a thorough tour. On the street, we bumped into Anthony Trang, whom Koslow had hired to give massages to all of her managers, at her own expense. When I asked her about the events of 2020, she tended to reply in words that were nonspecific but seemed deeply felt. “It was a moment,” she said. “I’m not gonna make any excuse for it. It was the moment, and we were a part of it, and we’re better for it. I’m better for it, you know?”

Not everyone is convinced. Shortly after Sqirl opened for dinner, Ben Mims, a cookbook author and former L.A. Times columnist, wrote on Instagram, “The collective amnesia people seem to have about Sqirl always astounds me.” When I reached him by phone, Joe Rosenthal wondered why restaurateurs who are caught behaving badly never seem to atone by ceding ownership to their employees. “That didn’t happen with Noma, as far as I know,” he said. A friend of mine, a keen observer of the restaurant world, opined that Koslow is a “perfect twenty-first century figure.” “Everything was more than it should have been,” he said. “Heralded more than she should have been. Shamed more than she should have been.”

Koslow, a self-described “student of restaurants,” talks about the dining experience as something that goes well beyond food; perfecting it requires an auteurish sense for atmosphere and character. For many years, she has employed full-time designers to help execute the finer details of her vision, from the fonts on her granola packaging to the lighting in the bathroom. Every afternoon, before “P.M.” service, the staff does a full turnover, replacing the metal folding tables on the sidewalk with elegant wooden ones, set with flowers and wineglasses. One recent evening, two older couples arrived for a five-thirty reservation; they turned out to be colleagues of Koslow’s husband, Ryan Erlich, and their wives. They fawned like proud parents over Koslow. “This is the girl who gets—who was it, on the ‘Today’ show?” one of the men said. “Matt Lauer!” his wife exclaimed. Koslow looked slightly embarrassed, then explained that, in 2016, Lauer opened a jar of Sqirl jam on TV. “I woke up in the morning to forty-five thousand dollars in sales online,” she said sheepishly.

What impressed me most about my own dinners at Sqirl were the marks of Koslow’s gift for world-building. There are subtle nods to the heavy-hitter institutions that she reveres: napkins with buttonholes so they can be attached to one’s lapel, like they have at Hillstone, and small sheets of green stationery for doodling on, printed with a cartoon of a tuxedoed waiter, a tribute to the New York steak house Keen’s. The evening menu veers more formal and European—pommes aligot, beef tartare, smoked-beet agnolotti—but it’s threaded with sly references to the greatest hits of daytime, such as an excellent Sorrel Sour cocktail, and jam made from Jimmy Nardello peppers served with toasted sourdough.

For more than a decade, a crew of loyalists who became friends at Sqirl—a public librarian, a fitness C.E.O., more than one film producer—have met there for breakfast every Saturday when it opens, at 8 A.M. “I made an album of my kids growing up at Sqirl,” Sarah Sugerman, an “O.G.” member of the breakfast club, said one recent morning, while knitting and eating an egg sandwich. It was where her son, now in his twenties, had staged a “promposal.” Koslow always wanted Sqirl to feel like “Cheers,” Erlich told me, and she’d been delighted when Rhea Perlman, who played Carla Tortelli on the show, recently came for dinner. ♦