The dining room glows a light violet. The playlist is a Gen-X dream of Pavement, Smashing Pumpkins and Bjork. The chatter ebbs at a comfortable hum over the delicately tweezer-placed ribbons of sweet potato and slivers of radish.
Jacaranda is Daniel Patterson’s first return in 10 years to cooking in a fine-dining kitchen. It’s also, he says, a little more like a dinner party. It’s certainly less formal than San Francisco’s Coi, where he made his name and served one of the country’s most acclaimed tasting menus.
His wife, former music journalist and producer Sarah Lewitinn, welcomes guests to the new Hollywood restaurant. She’s often dressed in a ballgown and just as often outspoken, cracking jokes or spilling kitchen secrets as she converses with every table. With only one seating each day, guests are encouraged to linger past their 10-course, $295 tasting menus.
The price is formal, but the more casual service reflects the evolution of Patterson’s cooking as well as where he thinks fine dining might be headed. With more socializing and a less-stuffy environment, Jacaranda, he says, is tailored to the way he thinks L.A. wants to enjoy high-level dining: That mix of high-low, he says, has proved “a revelation.”
“I was really lucky to be part of a generation that did a lot to change how people cook, and Coi did a lot of that,” Patterson says. “My question was: What does fine dining look like in 2026?”
Guests in the lavender-tinted dining room of Jacaranda restaurant.
(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)
Patterson stepped away from his chef duties at Coi in 2016 (though he retained ownership until its 2022 closure) in order to launch Locol in Watts with Roy Choi and later Alta in West Adams with Keith Corbin.
In his years away from the world of high-end tasting menus, he dedicated time to “inner healing” after years of channeling his energy and angst into the kitchen, chasing what he called “lightning bolt moments.” Older and calmer, he worried his creativity might suffer without chasing those highs, but he’s found the opposite to be true. Creative flow, he says, is stronger now because of it.
Of course, he’s reentering the fine-dining genre in a new era, one replete with social media influencers, a “camera eats first” mentality and ongoing debate over fine dining’s relevance, expense and labor practices.
In a city that balances world-class street vendors with world-class tasting menus, he hopes there will always be room for both in Los Angeles.
“I don’t like censorship, and saying some kinds of expression are OK and some kinds aren’t really sounds a whole lot like censorship to me,” Patterson says. “If I tell you only fine dining matters and there shouldn’t be any taco shops, that would be ridiculous. But if you say there should only be taco shops and no fine dining, that sounds equally ridiculous.”
An artichoke “flower” at Jacaranda restaurant, pictured May 3, 2026.
(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)
Patterson says he can’t speak to other kitchens, but at Jacaranda he’s trying to lead with more “kindness, compassion [and] patience” than before. He accommodates just one seating per night and one lunch seating on Sundays to allow the staff to work shorter hours and relieve some of the high-stress pressures so common in fine-dining kitchens.
His own cooking has also evolved. Patterson has used his years in L.A. to explore and better understand Southern California’s ingredients, such as the yerba santa he hand-picks two hours away in the desert. And he cooks with more spice than he did in the Bay Area.
As for the “X factor” that makes his more relaxed approach possible, Patterson says that would be Lewitinn. Also known as Ultragrrrl, she’s worked as a blogger, Spin magazine editor, record label founder and DJ. Sometimes her thoughts are unfiltered with guests, causing Patterson to pause. But the unscripted nature of Jacaranda, he says, is the beauty of it.
Because Jacaranda is also a love story.
Husband-and-wife team Daniel Patterson and Sarah Lewitinn stand in the foyer of their fine dining restaurant, Jacaranda.
(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)
Two-and-a-half years into their relationship, Lewitinn finally tasted Patterson’s true cooking. Previously, he’d been solicitous of her desire to eat the kind of vegetarian food that she already knew. But on a night when a wine-industry friend came to their home for dinner, Patterson cooked in his own style. When Lewitinn took her first bite, she cried.
“It was like realizing that a painter has been painting works for other people and not for themselves,” she says. “At that moment I was like, ‘I understand why you need to be a fine-dining chef. This is your calling.’ I became ride or die at that moment.”
He’d wanted to return to fine dining for years, with various starts and stops. Then, last summer, multiple friends suggested Patterson start more simply by hosting pop-ups. Lewitinn suggested using their own home.
They launched a ticketed 12-seat dinner series called Jaca Social Club, where Patterson said he felt like a 25-year-old line cook again, striving to make it. Despite the Michelin stars and decades in fine-dining kitchens, he felt as though he were rebuilding himself entirely.
“I think that cooking is fundamentally different [from other arts] in that whatever happened, it’s gone,” he says. “You’ve got to do it again, and you have to completely remake it.”
The pop-up could be loud and, above all, fun.
“I would tell people, ‘If I don’t hear you from the kitchen,’” Lewitinn says, “‘then I’m doing something wrong, so please be loud, be chatty.’”
Patterson also enlisted the aid of Coi’s former chef de cuisine, Andrew Miller, for the pop-up. He’s now behind the stove with Patterson at Jacaranda, and some of their pop-up dishes made it to Jacaranda’s opening menu. A bowl of soft tofu covered by a layer of fish gelatin is inlaid with fresh Monterey Bay seaweed and topped with a mound of caviar. Duck is crusted with multiple varieties of peppercorn.
Back in 2024, it was going to be Patterson and Alta’s Corbin in Jacaranda’s kitchen. They’ve since split their “spheres of influence,” Patterson says. Corbin is now solely in charge of Alta, which has temporarily closed for a reset and will reopen, its chef says, with a new menu in June. Corbin and Patterson both continue to run Locol and its tandem nonprofit, Alta Community.
That Alta Community spirit, or what Patterson calls “the bedrock of Alta” — mentoring staff — is also showing up at Jacaranda. Three positions so far have been filled with people served by the nonprofit.
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A version of Jacaranda’s soft tofu with fresh seaweed and caviar, pictured, first appeared during the Jaca Social Club pop-up series.
(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)
In a way, Patterson calls the struggles to open — including losing the old Son of a Gun space on Third Street — a blessing: “The path to Jacaranda, the restaurant that we have now, really just came out of failure and things not working out.”
Jaca Social Club ran for four and a half months before they found the former Koast space, which sits along Melrose Avenue adjacent to another fine-dining destination, Jordan Kahn’s Meteora, with Nancy Silverton’s Mozzaplex and Ludo Lefebvre’s Petit Trois nearby.
But Patterson and Lewitinn didn’t receive the keys until early March. The restaurant came together in only a month and a half. They replaced the carpet, the furniture, the ceiling, the drapes. They painted the room themselves. They swapped out kitchen equipment. They hung art by Lewitinn’s great-uncle Landes Lewitinn.
Then, earlier this month, they flipped on the sounds of Neutral Milk Hotel, Oasis and Mazzy Star, and fired vermilion fish grilled and served with steamed Kauai prawn, nasturtium folded into dainty sandwiches, and vegetables floating in yerba santa and nopal juice. Patterson’s dishes are still considered, but with an element of improvisation everywhere else.
“The way we’ve done things forever might not be applicable to this,” Patterson says. “So let’s create this as we go.”
Jacaranda is located at 6623 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles, and open Monday to Saturday with seatings beginning at 5:30 p.m., and on Sunday with seatings beginning at noon.
