Jessica Koslow

When did food capture you?

I’ve always loved food but I grew up as a figure skater and so I had to watch what I ate. Only when I went into college and grad school was I able to explore my relationship to food. When I moved to the South, I ate at Bacchanalia, which is a restaurant in Atlanta, one of the best restaurants in the US, definitely one of the best restaurants in the South. And it blew me away. The meal, the experience, everything blew me away. I was young, like 22, still figuring it out. That was my first foray into really having that connection with food.

Why did you start with jams?

I wrote to Bacchanalia after I had that meal, I wrote a letter to them. I said, look, I’ll scrub your floors, I’ll do whatever it takes, but let me cook in your kitchen. I really have a sweet tooth and I wanted to work in pastry and they hired me on as a pastry chef.

Part of the food mantra in the South is everything preserved. Pickles, jams, charcuterie, it was just part of my daily regiment. We were doing it there out of necessity. I think in California, we see it’s sunny all the time so we take for granted that we have all these varieties, that our growing seasons are long enough to grow things that have an extreme amount of flavor. Nowhere else in the States, if not the world, do you have that kind of growing capacity. So when I moved here to L.A., I used that technique I learned in the South and married it with this excitement for varieties in produce. Does that make sense?

Sure, kind of.

You’ll figure it out.

Did you say the word ‘jam’ in there? 

Did I say ‘jam’ in there? I don’t know.

Jams, preservatives…

Preserves!

Right [laughing].

Curious to hear about your rice bowl… the inspiration and why it’s so dang popular.

I don’t know. It’s very vibrant in flavor with the sorrel and the preserved lemon and dill. Dill rice is a Persian thing. I have a very good friend that I grew up eating dill rice with. Sorrel itself, as a puree, is incredibly delicious. It was just a happy accident. I have no brilliance behind it. Those are the things that happen.

I would love to tell you I have some crazy genius. The thing is, salmon and sorrel is a very popular French traditional dish. I ate it at this place called The Cass House, in Northern California, and I decided I wanted to eat sorrel on everything. I took that into my dill rice. And we preserve lemons here, we make hot sauce here. Our hot sauce takes 2 months and all of those flavors, the nuance of lactic acid and preserved lemons, it’s very Californian in a way. It’s incredibly successful and I have no idea. We thought these are great ingredients that all taste really vibrant. Let’s put them in a pot and see what happens. It was great.

What is the favorite part of your menu?

I think it’s exciting that we all have a similar idea of what breakfast and lunch is, and for us (at Sqirl) it’s trying to reimagine breakfast and lunch so that it’s different but still seems familiar. Staples are the most interesting to me, things that are standard and never change. Most of the time on a menu it’s a burger or steak frites. But none of our staples are things you’ve heard of before. That’s what exciting, to try and create things that become staples that were never in anyone’s mind before.

For example?

The rice dish we talked about, the sorrel rice bowls, that’s a great example. The Kabbouleh, which is a kale salad made with puffed rice and cauliflower instead of couscous. We have a carrot pancake on the menu, that’s become a staple.

Sounds tasty.

We also have a burnt brioche, where we take brioche and char it over a flame and top it with ricotta and jam. Again, it’s the thing that people are like, wait a minute, I haven’t had that before but now I’m putting ricotta on every piece of toast with jam and it’s delicious. It’s an exciting thing to take staples and elevate them.

What are your favorite ingredients to cook with?

Well it depends, right?

Okay. Lunch ingredients.

You know, I love vegetables. Bittman talks about protein being an accessory, and I think a very similar way. I think that your body needs a lot of greens and legumes and those kinds of things first. I tend to cook well with all sorts of greens and vegetables and herbs. That’s what I love. Do I need to give specifics? Do you want specifics?

Sure. Let me do it again. What are your favorite ingredients to cook with?

[Jessica looks outside, thinking]

Bananas, coconuts, pineapples, ding dongs?

None of that stuff [smiling]. Gross [laughing]. No, just kidding. I think I would have to say that I like to cook with brassicas, which are brussels and cauliflowers and broccolis, and leafy, hearty greens. I really love dill and tarragon and chives. I think those are my favorite herbs. If I’m thinking about a seafood, spot prawns. I love to cook spot prawns. And roe, too.

American Idol to Sqirl. How does that happen?

Well I was at Bacchanalia first, as a pastry chef. And then I moved to New York and thought how am I going to make this work? The food industry paid 10 dollars an hour, how do you survive? I went to college and graduate school but had no idea how to translate what I was cooking into a business.

So I went to graduate school at Georgetown. I did a masters in basically media theory, and it was perfect connection between television, digital media, and what I went to school for. Most of the people I went to school with work in hot digital agencies in New York. The trajectory was there. That’s how that happens. And then I moved back here and I was with Idol for 4 years, all the while I was missing food and that connection to food. So I started baking at night. I would go to Village Bakery and bake their bread, then I’d get out at 8, sleep for 2 hours, and then go to work.

Wow. That can only last so long.

That can only last so long, and now I’m here. 

Idol was in the background.

Idol’s a distant memory.

How do you find the farmers you want to work with?

Part of it is the farmer’s market. Part of it is from just knowing people. For example one of my farmers that I love, James Burch from Flora Bella, he had a terrible crop year for Santa Rosa plums. He’s my guy. I get thousands of pounds of plums from him, and it means we have no Santa Rosa plum jam this year—and we’re at least 300% busier this year than we were last year—so what am I going to do? Well he knows a guy down the road that has Santa Rosa plums. Again, knowing people, it’s a matter of meeting the right people and keeping your circle tight and close.

When I think about grains I want to use, it’s easy to just get bulk grains from chef’s warehouse. But our rice is from a Northern California rice grower. It’s an heirloom variety brought in the early 1900’s and she brings down pallets every month for us. That’s a choice. For me, I sought her out. I wanted to figure out how to use grains. And I get garbanzos from her, those are her cover crops. We have a fisherman who comes here—she just dropped off that fish today [pointing to the kitchen]. She is gutting that fish right now, did you shoot some of that?

Oh yeah.

And she’s setting me up with a number of other fisherman because we’re opening up a night spot. So there you go.

Who would you most like to cook for and why?

An amazing thing happened and actually I did get to cook for that person. Dan Barber came to L.A. to do a talk on his new book called The Third Plate. He did a talk around the corner at a place called… I don’t remember what the place is called, doesn’t even matter. So we cooked the dinner for KCRW’s members and then he came in here and we cooked for him the next day. He had heard about what we do here, heard about us, and he was as excited to meet us as we were to meet him. I’m sure I was more excited, but it was amazing and an honor I got to cook for him. I feel like his perspective on food is one that I share 100%. So that’s the guy. I got to cook for him.

Perfect.

There will be someone else, there has to be, but for now that was like… holy shit.

And that’s a cool book.

Yeah, I started reading it, I got like 3 pages in, but you know…

Glad you said that, I got to 4. I got through the introduction but then I had to read it twice because I waited a week in between.

Yeah, I’ll get there. First book I’ve read in a while. Need to read it for sure. 

It needs more photos. It’s this thick [makes an inch with his fingers] and he doesn’t have photos!

He’s a verbose guy.

OK, but he needs to have photos.

He should hire you. 

There you go!

I’ll give him a call.

How does a chef learn to cook with integrity?

I think you have to check in. You have to check in every day and ask yourself what you want and what you’re willing to give up. That’s the way you cook with integrity every day. I’ve chosen to be in Virgil Village, which means I’m not paying Beverly hills rent. It means I don’t have to skimp on the people I bring in, or the quality of the produce I’m using. That’s a choice I had to make. I am sure there are other choices I’ll have to make, too, but it’s the check-in. You have to know yourself and check in with that.

Keeping yourself honest.

And you know what? As it gets bigger and restaurants get busier and there’s more opportunity for fame, success, money, whatever—checking in is even harder. You think, maybe it’s not as important to me anymore. Maybe the next thing is going to LAX. That’s a check-in. And maybe for me it’ll be selling Sqirl to the highest bidder and having it manufactured nationwide. That’s a check-in. I have to ask myself those questions, every day, because this is exhausting. Cooking with integrity is exhausting. But what else am I am going to do?

What are you going to do, sit at your house all day? Walk your dog?

Well that’d be great. I’d make shiso lemon verbena tea all the time [all laughing].