By Monica Burton, Eater, September 1, 2020
Shortly after the news broke that Sqirl, one of LA’s most popular restaurants, had been serving jam from buckets that developed mold, it became clear that food handling was just one of Sqirl’s issues. Jessica Koslow was accused of taking credit for her employees’ contributions and, then, the spotlight turned to comments she had made about Sqirl’s Virgil Village neighborhood years ago. Alongside moldy jam, there was another issue that could no longer be ignored: Koslow was unapologetic about her restaurant’s role in the area’s gentrification.
Sqirl opened in 2011 in Virgil Village, a pocket of Los Angeles populated by Salvadoran churches, Ecuadorian restaurants, and auto garages. Rent for the 800-square-foot space, by Koslow’s admission, was incredibly cheap. “My cheat is this shitty corner on Virgil and Marathon,” she said in 2016. “My cheat is like, I pay $2 per square foot.” Soon after opening, the restaurant’s grain bowls and $15 jars of seasonal jam drew lines of customers. The notion that Sqirl was the first desirable business in a neighborhood populated mostly by Central Americans became a part of the restaurant’s origin story: On another occasion, Koslow described the location as being “on a street no one knew about, in a neighborhood no one cared about.”
“There’s an image that the restaurant is looking to cultivate,” former Sqirl sous chef Gabe Rios recently told the LAnd magazine. “And over time, the image became very clearly not where the community was, but where it was going.” But against the backdrop of this summer’s Black Lives Matter movement and calls to support BIPOC-owned businesses, an outwardly progressive restaurant could no longer support gentrification without scrutiny.
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