Sqirl - Los Angeles

[hppzz]

this article is deeper dive on the workers and her role:

Beyond Moldy Jam: The Inside Story of What Went Wrong at Sqirl

some choice quotes:

" Publicly, Koslow regularly described the neighborhood as undesirable, referring to Sqirl’s location as “a street corner that no one wanted to be on” and “a street no one knew about, in a neighborhood no one cared about.” In a 2016 Eater profile, she called the spot a “shitty corner on Virgil and Marathon.” And on Chang’s 2019 podcast episode, she referred to Virgil Village as being on the “buttcrack of Silver Lake.” Koslow then told Chang that Sqirl “became the community restaurant that the community was looking for.” That “community” was Silver Lake, not Virgil Village."

“In the beginning it was great,” Barbosa, who worked at Sqirl from 2012 to 2014, told us over the phone. “It was very collaborative. [Koslow] had all these ideas but didn’t know quite how to execute, given her little experience. And that’s where I came in.”

On origins of the sorrel pesto bowl: Ria “She says one day, Koslow expressed a desire for a dish with sorrel, preserved lemons, brown rice, and feta. Barbosa suggested they use a sorrel pesto instead of cutting up the leafy greens. “I said, ‘If we turn it into pesto, you get flavor throughout,'” Barbosa recalled. The result was the Sorrel Pesto Bowl, one of Sqirl’s best-known dishes.”

On origins of the riccota toast: One day, Barbosa’s sous chef and then-husband, Matt Wilson, wanted a snack. As Barbosa tells it, he slathered fresh ricotta on a piece of slightly burnt toast and threw on some jam.

“At first, Koslow kind of turned her nose up at it,” Barbosa says. But after seeing how much staff loved it, she agreed to put it on the menu. “The rest is history — except the history has been changed.”

the hidden kitchen: "a kitchen in the back — one where ten current and former employees say they’d hid from health inspectors on more than one occasion…Fields says she and a co-worker killed the lights and hid for an hour inside the kitchen while a manager on the other side of the door played dumb and told the inspector they didn’t have the keys. "

[DTLAeater]

@robert

It was just bad writing. Only an idiot would tell such an easily checked lie. She talked with her mentors and looked for what expert advice she could find, and lumped all that together into a misleading sentence.

Bad writing is a charitable interpretation. Perhaps because you would never intentionally mislead in that way. But I see this kinds of stretches every day…

The full statement was that mold developed on the surface “that we handled with the guidance of preservation mentors and experts like Dr. Patrick Hickey…” (emphasis added).

Think about what you’d have to do to craft a sentence like this. You’d have to go find out what article was consulted years ago, if at all. You’d have to pull out the doctor’s name from that article because you were looking to appeal to authority. There is also the implication that multiple “experts” were consulted. This sentence was carefully crafted to mislead in my opinion. But of course, we can never know 100%.

[robert]

I don’t think Alice Waters ever had much vision for her chefs beyond wanting Chez Panisse to be a great place to work (profit sharing, health care, six-day workweek split between two chefs).

[moonboy403]

@robert

great place to work

That and locally sourced farm-to-table ingredients.

[robert]

Local sourcing and farm-to-table were accidental. Chino Farm, for example, is 500 miles away. Waters was stubbornly looking for ingredients of the same quality she’d had in France and ended up creating an alternative food distribution system.

[bruins]

The article is very good, but I think the quotes you chose don’t show the nuanced view that it provides.

[robert]

Isn’t Virgil Village the gentrifying real estate agents’ name for that part of East Hollywood?

In the US, recipes are not anyone’s intellectual property, nor for that matter is anything created on a work-for-hire basis.

[robert]

@bruins

I think the quotes you chose don’t show the nuanced view that it provides.

For example:

Fonseca, former food runner Arlan Meacher, and an employee who asked to remain anonymous, believe some of the allegations against Koslow have been blown out of proportion. They say they never felt physically unsafe working at Sqirl, even during the construction.

“What’s unfortunate about this is because there are a lot of things here and there that have kernels of truth, anyone reading into this at this moment must think that with that much smoke, there’s obviously fire,” Meacher says. “She’s an imperfect boss and she has imperfect ways of dealing with things just like any other human being on this earth.”

[moonboy403]

@robert

Fonseca, former food runner Arlan Meacher, and an employee who asked to remain anonymous, believe some of the allegations against Koslow have been blown out of proportion. They say they never felt physically unsafe working at Sqirl, even during the construction.

Perhaps because Mr food runner wasn’t in the pastry team working inside mold city with no ventilation nor hot water.

“It was very small. There were no windows, no ventilation, lots of mold,” Fields says, referring to the space where she says she spent about 90 percent of her time during her one- and-a-half years at Sqirl. “Everything about it was just disgusting.”

The kitchen, which was behind a locked door, had two induction burners, a convection oven for the pastry team, and a sink that at times lacked hot water, according to Fields. “I recall having to boil water to wash dishes on more than one occasion,” she says.

Sasha Piligian, a former pastry chef, says she never felt safe working in that kitchen. “The whole time I worked there, I was working with no ventilation. There was no hood system,” she says. “Everything we were making, it always had a certain odor.”

---

Still mold city in 2020

On a busy day during the middle of service in early 2020, Huber told us, he went to retrieve a fresh bucket of jam from the walk-in refrigerator. He says most of the jam had mold on it, so he grabbed a fresh bucket. Huber says he returned to the restaurant and when he went to place the fresh jam in a small reach-in refrigerator, Koslow approached him and told him to swap it for an older jam bucket.

[TheCookie]

Alice Waters is a legend.

[js76wisco]

Borrowed from Twitter

[Ns1]

Totally safe. I consulted experts before making this post.

[paranoidgarliclover]

You mean you made the post w/ guidance from experts.

[robert]

Ha ha.

[J_L]

Free penicillin.

[boogiebaby]

What’s sad is that some people, such as myself, have an allergy to mold. I have difficulty breathing if I’m near mold or in an area with mildew. I would never expect to have that reaction eating a piece of toast in a restaurant. I’d probably end up in the hospital from ingesting mold spores.

I wonder how many people felt unwell after eating this jam and just assumed it was something in their environment, when it was that they ate mold contaminated jam.

[robert]

They never served mold spores. Someone allergic to mold would surely have had a problem in the illegal kitchen before it was brought up to code.

[paranoidgarliclover]

Oh, I thought that Koslow had stated that it was possible that some mold-contaminated jam was served in the restaurant but that the mold-contaminated jam never made it into jars sold at retail…?

[Ns1]

@paranoidgarliclover

Koslow had stated

“I never sold that moldy jam”, said the person with an illegal prep kitchen full of moldy jam

[paranoidgarliclover]

Ahem. To be fair (to me), I was paraphrased Koslow only to indicate that it is not accurate to say that mold spores were never served…