Why chef Daniel Patterson turned his home into a supper club. Plus, the return of Ray Garcia’s Broken Spanish, mole-inspired Thanksgiving turkey, a cocktailian spirit revival, cheesy recipes for fall, the endurance of pumpkin spice season and a robot wok taste test. I’m Laurie Ochoa, general manager of L.A. Times Food, with Tasting Notes.
Not quite home cooking 
Roasted beets with nuts, seeds, chiles, herbs and edible flowers served at chef Daniel Patterson’s Jaca Social Club.
(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)
A woman waiting for a friend outside an elegant Hancock Park duplex was the only sign that we might be at the right place. Then we spotted an open door and made our way up a winding staircase where we were warmly greeted by Sarah Lewitinn, one of two hosts for our evening at Jaca Social Club.
We had made a reservation and pre-paid for our dinners on Resy, as you might for many other restaurants. But Jaca is not a restaurant. It’s more like a dinner party, except the guests are paying customers and the food is prepared by one of the country’s most talented chefs, Daniel Patterson of Coi and Alta Adams fame. Oh, and the whole thing takes place at Patterson and Lewitinn’s actual home.
A server offered drinks as Lewitinn brought us into a high-ceilinged, tastefully decorated space where some of the guests — usually 12 to 14 people — were already seated on couches and comfortable chairs.
As she made introductions, Lewitinn showed off her party trick of instantly remembering every guest’s name — except for one guy named Chris. Then, like a good host, she shared tidbits she’d learned from researching the guests online to help break the ice. One guest was a musician and writer I’d once worked with but hadn’t seen for years. The others were strangers who we slowly started to get to know even as some among us periodically checked our phones for the Game 2 score of the World Series, reassured that the Dodgers were still ahead.
Patterson emerged from the kitchen to join Lewitinn, his wife of three years who has had a formidable and sometimes harrowing career in the music industry as a producer and writer, but tonight was enjoying her role as Jaca’s emcee. In fact, Patterson later said that it was her idea to open up their home for pop-up dinners after his plans for a fine dining restaurant slowed.
Last year, as he told reporter Stephanie Breijo, he was hoping to open in Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo’s old Son of a Gun space. But in tough economic times, it’s not easy to line up the funding needed to create the kind of tasting menu experience Patterson envisions.
Jaca Social Club, which ended its run earlier this month, was created as a sort of preview of what’s to come when he eventually opens a proper brick-and-mortar restaurant.
In spirit, the idea is similar to what Pizzana founding chef Daniele Uditi did last year with several small dinner parties at his home. They were so successful, the chef created the just-concluded Lele Dinner Club pop-up series in a “not-a-restaurant” warehouse space in West Adams where, as columnist Jenn Harris wrote, Uditi was “shedding and shunning the notions of a Los Angeles Italian restaurant.”
For Patterson’s home experience, two dining room tables were set for dinner. Professional servers hired for the night poured wine after we took our seats. Soon we were presented with a dish that fans of Patterson’s former San Francisco restaurant Coi might recognize as a version of what he used to call the California Bowl. Shards of spice-dusted puffed brown rice crackers dotted with tiny radishes were arranged around a quenelle of charred avocado puree.
“It’s a kind of chips and dip,” Patterson said with a grin.
A procession of gorgeous dishes mixed with good conversation followed. There was an intense purple ice made from Niabell grapes with the sweetness of the Concord-style grapes offset by wild bay salt. Tofu that Patterson made with Meiji soy milk was topped with seaweed and caviar. Roasted beets were arranged with nuts, herbs and edible flowers.
Popcorn grits with a side of popcorn served at Daniel Patterson’s Jaca Social Club.
(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)
Another Coi reprise, served with a side of popcorn, was Patterson’s popcorn grits, which goes beyond party-trick cleverness and could easily be imagined as a base for presenting fish or shellfish (as Patterson later said he’s done). The night’s fish was black cod wrapped in a smoked mousse and served with yogurt-dill sauce. Then came a still-life-worthy presentation of matsutake mushrooms. Seared duck breast arrived with a drip artist’s dose of elderberry sauce, a side salad that popped with duck cracklings and a potent duck broth that had everyone around the table raving.
For dessert, there was quince poached with saffron and ginger served with buttermilk sorbet, pomegranate seeds and tiny rosemary flowers, followed by a passion fruit marshmallow.
Dessert at Daniel Patterson’s Jaca Social Club included poached quince with saffron, ginger, pomegranate seeds and buttermilk ice cream.
(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)
Is this the menu Patterson will serve at Jacaranda when it eventually opens? Certainly, there will be the same sense of play that he brings to high cuisine, but I suspect that his food will continue to evolve.
Patterson, after all, is a chef at a crossroads. And that’s not an unfamiliar place for him. The founder of San Francisco’s Coi, which at one point before its 2022 closing earned three Michelin stars under chef Matthew Kirkley and maintained two Michelin stars for much of its life, has looked for meaning beyond fine dining throughout his career. In 2013, he’d already been teaching teens and young adults cooking skills through a nonprofit he co-founded when he went to Copenhagen for Rene Redzepi’s MAD Symposium and heard Kogi BBQ founder Roy Choi challenge the world’s great chefs to pay attention to the hunger issues in their own backyards — to “do something and feed those that we’re not feeding.”
By the end of 2015, Patterson had largely left behind the day-to-day demands of fine dining’s highest echelons, placing Coi in the hands of Kirkley and then chef Erik Anderson so that he could concentrate on working with Choi to open the Watts restaurant Locol. The idea was to bring healthy fast food to a neighborhood that had mostly been ignored by L.A. chefs. He also entered partnerships with emerging Bay Area chefs in need of capital to start or expand their restaurant operations.
His efforts met with mixed success. In 2017, Locol was chosen as the L.A. Times Restaurant of the Year by Jonathan Gold, but its second location in Oakland received a negative review by Pete Wells in the New York Times and by August of 2018, the project had shifted from a restaurant to an occasional catering operation. Patterson’s partnerships with the Bay Area chefs Reem Assil, Heena Patel and Nigel Jones also came to an end when each of the chefs wanted to assert more control over the restaurants attached to their names.
Patterson’s most successful partnership has been with Keith Corbin, who is the chef and owner of Alta Adams. Corbin wasn’t aspiring to be a chef when he went to work for Choi and Patterson at Locol, but he quickly came to love the work and pitched the idea of soul food made with better ingredients than what he saw at his neighborhood markets. Corbin was a natural in the kitchen and after some ups and downs that he detailed in his memoir “California Soul,” he’s grown into a great chef and community leader. Alta is consistently on the L.A. Times 101 Best Restaurants in Los Angeles guide and has received many other accolades. Although Patterson is no longer a part of Alta Adams, he continues to work with Corbin through Alta Community, the nonprofit they started to teach restaurant skills to local youth. Last summer, he and Patterson briefly reopened Locol as a restaurant and base for Alta Community, which now has a new executive director and is actively raising money to use the Locol space for on-the-job training.
Chef Daniel Patterson
(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)
Now Patterson says, he feels it’s time to stretch his fine dining muscles again, but on new terms.
“I don’t have that same need to fill something missing in me with a restaurant,” he said. “So my question to myself is, ‘Now what?’ And my answer is joy. I love to cook. I love cooking with a team of people, and I love cooking for people. … I want people to come in and feel this kind of spell at the table. I want to create a place of positivity and connection with the community. And for the team, I want a place of learning, where people are really engaged with asking the question: How do I become a little better every day? And also, how do we interact with each other? It can be so beautiful.”
Stay tuned.
At Thanksgiving, pass the mole 
For Thanksgiving, a mole-inspired turkey rubbed with spices — pasilla chile, cinnamon, clove and allspice — and basted with butter is roasted with fennel, oranges and herbs.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
For Carolynn Carreño‘s father, born in Mexico City, Thanksgiving was a curiosity he was eager to experience when he married her Southern California-raised mom. These days, as Carreño writes, “many Mexican families on both sides of the border celebrate ‘American’ Thanksgiving.” With the cross-cultural exchange of the holiday, it seems right to look to Mexico, home of the turkey variety that gave us so many Butterballs, for recipe inspiration. Carreño came up with a beautiful holiday meal led by Roasted Turkey With Mole-Inspired Spice Rub, served with Easy Mole on the side and for stuffing, Holiday Picadillo With Dried Fruit and Nuts. To cap it all off, her Mexican Chocolate Pecan Tart is so good you likely won’t have leftovers.
The return of Broken Spanish 
Fideo verde with fennel, hoja santa, avocado and parmesan at Ray Garcia’s Broken Spanish Comedor.
(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)
After reading Stephanie Breijo’s interview with chef Ray Garcia about the return of his Broken Spanish brand through a more approachable version of his cooking at the new Culver City restaurant Broken Spanish Comedor, I’m craving his fideo verde. It’s “a riff,” Breijo writes, on his mom’s fideo made with fennel, hoja santa, avocado and Parmesan. She also includes opening notes on David Chang’s new Westfield Century City mall restaurant Super Peach and Jeffrey Vance’s Old Gold Tomato Pies in Los Feliz.
The robot woks are here 
A selection of dishes from Tigawok restaurant in Burbank.
(Jenn Harris / Los Angeles Times)
Los Angeles is now home to two robot wok restaurant chains, Tomas Su and Kelvin Wang’s Tigawok in West L.A. with additional locations in Burbank and Irvine, plus Robowok near the campus of USC. Columnist Jenn Harris did a taste test to determine the best one. There was one clear winner plus the reassuring conclusion from Harris that “we haven’t reached total robot domination yet.”
Rediscovering that cocktailian spirit 
The menu at Long Beach’s Tokyo Noir is presented like a zine, with illustrations and tasting notes for each cocktail, including the pictured Dirty Soba.
(Jenn Harris / Los Angeles Times)
Harris also visited Tokyo Noir, the Long Beach bar opened late last year by Kevin Lee and Jesse Duron, and discovered a thriving outpost of L.A.’s 21st century cocktail revolution. One particularly inventive Japanese-inspired cocktail transported her to 2009, when “the Varnish had just opened its doors” and “turned cocktail-curious Angelenos into serious connoisseurs.” The drinks, she says, show “the complexities and showmanship of a multicourse tasting menu.”
Pumpkin spice and its variations 
In addition to a pumpkin spice latte, Alder & Sage in Long Beach serves a whiskey caramel latte in which oak smoke infuses the restaurant’s whiskey caramel sauce and black salt rims the glass.
(Rimi Abuhussein)
Halloween is over, but pumpkin spice season endures. Danielle Dorsey and Stephanie Breijo updated our guide to Southern California’s 15 most tempting pumpkin spice lattes and seasonal drinks, including, as they wrote, “lattes sweetened with sweet potato, horchata and whiskey-caramel [seen above from Alder & Sage], as well as an influx of embellished matcha and hojicha creations that reflect L.A.’s growing tea scene.”
Also …The date has been set and early bird tickets are now available for the reveal party celebrating the L.A. Times 101 Best Restaurants in Los Angeles, chosen by critic Bill Addison and columnist Jenn Harris, and sponsored by Open Table and Square. Join us on Dec. 9 at the Hollywood Palladium. Plus, Betty Hallock on why fall is the best season for cheese along with 7 of our cheesiest recipes.And Jenn Harris talked with Jessie YuChen, who developed the recipes for the new book “For the Love of Kewpie,” about cooking with the Japanese mayonnaise. “It’s like adding a pinch of salt to your baked goods.”Finally … we received terrific news out of last week’s International Assn. of Culinary Professionals Awards. Led by our restaurant critic Bill Addison with important contributions from columnist Jenn Harris, L.A. Times Food won this year’s prize for restaurant criticism and reviews. Singled out for recognition was Addison’s review of Jordan Kahn’s Vespertine as well as Addison and Harris’ assessment of the 101 Best Restaurants in Los Angeles and the entire Food team’s guide to the 101 Best Tacos in Los Angeles, with contributions from Addison, Harris, Stephanie Breijo, Danielle Dorsey, Betty Hallock, Daniel Hernandez, Sarah Mosqueda, Cindy Carcamo and myself. In addition, Dorsey was a finalist in the narrative food writing with recipes category for her story “The warmth of Black traditions around the Thanksgiving table.”
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