Review: Sqirl redefined brunch. Can it change the way we think about dinner?

It should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Sqirl’s outsized influence on Los Angeles dining in its early years that owner Jessica Koslow’s interpretation of chicken liver — a dish now synonymous with any respectable small plates restaurant — is whimsical, overtly delicious and resembles a Stephen Ormandy painting.

If we momentarily time travel to the 2010s, you’ll recall that it was Sqirl’s ricotta toast smeared with a color quadtych of jam that caused a seismic shift in how Angelenos view brunch. And the restaurant’s bowls of rice coated in forest-green sorrel pesto that gave way to a citywide “things in a bowl” craze. Can the new dinner service at Koslow’s 14-year-old Virgil Village restaurant change the way we think about eating after dark?

Well, the chicken liver is a good start.

Half of the plate is covered by massive slabs of the restaurant’s own country bread, every surface annealed and shiny with schmaltz. On the side, a green-apple-hued rectangle with rounded edges the size of a bar of soap. This is the chicken liver, sheathed in a layer of compound celery butter. And nestled next to it, a mahogany quenelle of membrillo gastrique. The first thing that registers is the bright, grassy bitter edge of the celery. It lingers alone for a moment before giving way to a familiar mineral offal funk. Then the sharp acidity of the gastrique rushes in, like the third and final act in a single mouthful.

Think of it as the ricotta toast of dinner.

“Guillermo had a great recipe for chicken liver, and it was a matter of getting the aesthetic right,” says Koslow, referencing executive chef Guillermo Mendez. Koslow, who started Sqirl as a farmers market jam business in 2011, is quick to highlight the contributions of Mendez, as well as chef de cuisine Sandra Felix with the launch of the restaurant’s new dinner menu in February.

Diners fill the sidewalk tables in front of Sqirl on an early summer evening.

(Ron De Angelis / For The Times)

It’s all part of the course correction undertaken by Koslow after more than a decade of triumphs and stumbles, of diners and critics calcifying their opinions. For those of you familiar with Koslow’s setbacks, which are easy to read about online, I don’t feel the need to rehash them here. After 14 years, there’s no such thing as a clean slate, but this is a restaurant that deserves to at least be examined with fresh eyes.

Nighttime Sqirl is a grown-up version of itself, now open past its bedtime. The lights are low, there are place settings on wooden tables with flowers, and everything from the plates to the branded stationery nudge the vibes toward stylized and playful, but undoubtedly sexier than its daytime counterparts. It’s a deliberate, painstaking transformation that takes place daily in the 90 minutes between lunch and dinner. The coffee bar becomes an actual bar. All of the prepped dinner ingredients replace brunch items in the kitchen. New furniture is moved onto both the side patio and front sidewalk.

The dinner menu echos the same ethos of the cafe, laser-focusing on hyperseasonal ingredients, fermentation and strategic pops of mouthwatering acid. Big wedges of juicy tomato and peaches are plated in a heap on top of an extra creamy whipped tofu fortified with konbu dashi, lending it the body and decadence of a farmers cheese. Fried mint, the dark sweetness of saba and a dusting of confited, dehydrated and pulverized tomato push the salad into something gloriously excessive.

“That dish is all Guillermo,” says Koslow. “He is a sauce master.”

A Cosmo cocktail, pork with tortillas and grilled stone fruit, and striped beet agnolotti with smoked beet filling and ricotta whey butter sauce. (Ron De Angelis / For The Times)

A corn risotto buttressed by a sweet and savory Brentwood corn slurry, Aleppo chile oil and parmesan is a pure and poignant celebration of the ubiquitous summer vegetable at its peak. And omnipresent corn agnolotti is reimagined with a velvety caramelized onion and smoked beet puree suspended in thick and pleasantly stiff parcels of fuchsia-striped pasta. The whey left from the restaurant’s housemade ricotta serves as the base for the aggressively tart sauce.

One of Mendez’s signature dishes is the pork collar with flour tortillas and grilled fruit. He rubs the pork in porcini and hojicha from Kettl Tea, cold smokes the meat and brushes it with tamarindo. It takes on a Southern barbecue sensibility, with a crust the color of midnight, equal parts caramelized sweetness and earthy char. Pile it onto a beautifully tender and flaky tortilla, then run it through the sikil pak that lines the bottom of the plate. It’s how you might imagine a taco from Sqirl.

The inclusion of wine and cocktails helps reinforce Sqirl’s new dinner persona. Beverage director Kayla Garcia is behind a list of familiar classics infused with big personality, and ingredients and techniques that stay true to Sqirl’s guiding principles of fermentation and seasonality. Mini martinis are made in dainty, vermouth-rinsed glasses filled with Gotha Menegiks gin, tasting vaguely of seawater and spearmint. The Cosmo is what I wish I was sipping in the early 2000s, striking just the right acidity with fresh blood oranges, verjus rouge and St. George vodka.

The wines at Sqirl’s marketplace, beef tartare served with thick-cut chips and Weiser melon for dessert.

The restaurant is still settling into its new identity, with dishes evolving after each visit. During one dinner, some of the cubes of steak tartare were too big and tough to get down, but we couldn’t stop eating the potato chips and smoky tonnato. Masa-coated onion rings bordered on burnt during another visit, though the avocado dip that accompanied them could accurately be described as a silky smooth wonder condiment. The chicken went from a respectable chicken dinner one evening to a piece of poultry so tender it eliminated the need for cutlery, saturated in a bagna cauda exploding with the umami of a chicken-feet demi-glace, anchovy and charred lemon.

It’s tempting to measure the restaurant’s success against its own legacy. But that’s not quite the right test. With dinner, Koslow isn’t trying to create a cultural movement as much as she’s offering a space to walk into on a Tuesday night, sip a mini martini and doodle with your kid while you wait for your chicken. And that’s more than enough.

A team of chefs and managers in front of Sqirl.

(Ron De Angelis / For The Times)