When I still worked at Time Out, I had a general rule of thumb that benefitted both myself and restaurants: With few exceptions, I would not dine at a restaurant that had been open for less than two weeks. Invariably, the meal would suffer in one way another: a hot dish would arrive lukewarm, or the pacing would be a little wonky or even downright awful. From a critic’s perspective, the early dining experience is largely irrelevant, as it suffers from mishaps in timing or execution that can be largely chalked up to operational growing pains. Usually, after complaining privately, a publicist would plead with me to return for another meal, later on, and I’d be forced to carve out a second evening in my schedule while juggling the infinite stream of other new (and old) restaurants I also needed to visit.
I don’t work at Time Out anymore, not even on a freelance basis, and thus I am finally free to do as I wish. This includes traipsing to Sqirl on Day 4 of dinner service without doing the mental dining math on all the other places I need to visit just to fuck around and find out. During my meal, I saw several other food writers in the house, including folks from Eater and the Los Angeles Times, so I know I’m not alone in my curiosity about the pioneering Virgil Village café’s dinner menu. Per the restaurant’s Substack, it’s almost four years in the making.
As previously stated, this is not a formal review a la Max & Helen’s (which I like! albeit with major caveats), because Sqirl PM is understandably still working through operational kinks. A plate of off-menu butter noodles for a 3-year-old guest sent the timing of another group’s courses into a tailspin; I arrived late but within the 15 minute grace period of my 7:45 reservation and my party of four, which happens to include the excellent kat hong, unexpectedly closed down the place around 10:45pm. The last leg of our meal was lengthened by the fact another table accidentally received the molten chocolate lava cake we’d ordered (it happens!), which another staff member smoothed over with a complimentary round of dessert-y Barolo.
Mostly on my own dime, plus the occasional PR comp, I’ve been trying to keep up with the most interesting openings in LA since getting laid off in November. Against that backdrop, I believe dinner service at Sqirl is the new restaurant Los Angeles deserves for a few different reasons, including the culinary ingenuity of the food and drink options.
