The Sqirl Redemption Arc

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?”