Daniel Patterson and Sarah Lewitinn’s Jacaranda Plays to Its Own Beat
Daniel Patterson and Sarah Lewitinn want their new Los Angeles restaurant to be a fine-dining destination with dinner-party vibes. So at Jacaranda, which will open in the Hancock Park area on Wednesday, May 6, the married couple has a six-seat communal table for guests who are inclined to make new friends.
Patterson wants to rethink tasting-menu culture at the 30-seat restaurant. And one thing that Lewitinn noticed at Jaca Social Club, the precursor to Jacaranda that she and Patterson ran at their Hancock Park home, was demand from solo diners.
Jacaranda is, at its core, 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 enterprise at LocoL and Alta. Lewitinn, aka Ultragrrrl, was an influential New York City music tastemaker and DJ who helped shape the scene as bands like The Strokes, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Interpol took over.
Lewitinn met Patterson at the beginning of 2021. She asked him out on a date and later proposed to him. They got married in 2022. Patterson asked her to take a different kind of huge leap and create a restaurant together.
At Jacaranda, Patterson, chef Andrew Miller and pastry chef Matt Tinder are cooking with the same level of precision, technique and attention to detail that they did at Coi. But Patterson wants Jacaranda to “culturally feel like Los Angeles.” So he’s been foraging, hitting farmers’ markets and exploring the wonders of plants.
A lot of what Patterson cooks at Jacaranda, which serves 10-course, $295 tasting menus, is deceptively simple. It looks like food that you might be able to make at home, but then you take a bite and notice the details and realize you’re in a different realm altogether. During a preview of Jacaranda at the end of April, we ate asparagus that was cooked and cooled in its own juice. It tasted more like asparagus than any asparagus we’ve ever had.
A dish with pieces of about a dozen grilled and raw vegetables was served with a green juice made from yerba santa and nopales. (This dish was inspired by a vegetable aguachile that Patterson made in 2017 for a collaboration dinner with Taco Maria chef/Coi alum Carlos Salgado.)
“I was going out with a forager and learning more and more about native ingredients,” Patterson tells Observer. “I found the yerba santa, and it just blew me away. It didn’t smell like anything familiar. It was, like, sweet and resinous, almost like bubble gum. I was just like, ‘Fuck, this is amazing.’ But then I had to figure out how to extract the flavor without extracting the bitterness. And so what I ended up with is just putting it in cold
Discovering, clarifying, amplifying, calibrating, reducing, reconstructing, reimagining. Patterson and his team are aiming for nothing less than a singular experience as they build dishes like soft tofu with fresh seaweeds and caviar. They’re carefully considering time and temperature as they cut and serve pepper-crusted duck with a crackling-adorned green salad and a broth made from duck bones. They’re starting meals with little handheld bites like a yuba roll (which is filled with kelp and mushrooms and resembles a bonbon because Patterson was inspired by the shape of a Tootsie Roll) that’s steamed right before service and then is brought close to room temperature. Tinder has a dessert with raw chocolate, roasted kelp and dates that gave us a flavor combination we had never experienced but also somehow reminded us of the pleasure of eating s’mores. There are a lot of neat tricks like this at Jacaranda.
Patterson remains as community-oriented as ever, and he wants Jacaranda to be a pipeline into fine dining for communities that don’t have fine dining. He and Alta chef Keith Corbin continue to run LocoL in Watts as a vocational training program that addresses food insecurity. Patterson has two employees at Jacaranda who’ve come out of that program, and Corbin himself is a reminder of how the formerly incarcerated can thrive in kitchens and go on to run a restaurant.
Patterson and Lewitinn are very much looking forward to the day when they have staff leave to start their own business. But they also know that one great thing about the restaurant industry is how people who’ve parted ways can find a good reason to reunite.
“We’ve known each other for 15 years,” Patterson tells Observer as he talks about his relationship with Miller and Tinder. “We were talking about it. Maybe there’s like 100 years of experience between us. There is no kitchen this size that has that kind of firepower, but also, like, a kind of ESP with each other, because we know each other so well.”
For Patterson, food is about relationships, more than anything else.
“Human connection has always been the most important thing,” he says. “Food’s about people. Cooking is an act of generosity. Outside of sex, it’s the most human thing you can do with another person. And it’s the thing that builds the most memories with our family, with our friends when we go out. There’s something very visceral and emotional about that. So that’s kind of always, like, a truism for me. But then in this restaurant, I have this other factor called Sarah.”
Lewitinn spent years being at the center of raucous, decibel-shattering shows and parties, and Jacaranda is a quieter reset for her, even though the restaurant’s playlist includes punk and indie-rock songs suggested by guests.
“I told Daniel that I know a lot of people, but I don’t actually know them,” Lewitinn tells Observer. “Through the years of doing the music scene and the club scene, there were a lot of conversations that happened in very loud rooms in between drinks, makeouts and dancing. Getting into the food world has been the first opportunity that 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 engaging and also about disengaging.
“One of the things I used to do a lot when I was doing parties was, if I knew I was going to be busy and someone was coming to say hi to me, I would clock the room and find the person that I think they would connect really well with and bring them over,” she says. “I would introduce them, so they could start talking and I could go do my thing.”
In her new role in the restaurant industry, she’s “constantly trying to find the people that can become friends with each other.” When I visited Jaca Social Club a few months ago, I was a solo diner at a table that became fast friends. As dinner wrapped up, two couples at the table decided to go elsewhere for 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 for lunch on Sunday.