Daniel Patterson has spent the last three decades influencing the way America thinks about California cuisine. What has always made him compelling, however, is that he never approached food as something confined to the plate. For Patterson, restaurants have always been about ideas, culture, community, and the joy of cooking for others. His food just happens to be extraordinary too.
Most people first came to know Patterson through Coi, the groundbreaking restaurant he opened in 2006 that earned two MICHELIN stars under his leadership and became one of the defining fine dining restaurants of its era. His cooking felt distinctly Californian: deeply thoughtful without ever losing warmth or humanity. There was precision, restraint, and technique, but also emotion. Meals at Coi were not built around excess. They were built around feeling.
That curiosity eventually pushed Patterson beyond fine dining. In 2016, he teamed up with Roy Choi to launch LocoL, the ambitious fast-food project centered around accessibility, affordability, and opportunity. It was one of the first major chef-driven concepts to openly challenge who restaurants were built for and who gets left out of the conversation.
Since moving to Los Angeles in 2020, Patterson has continued evolving through projects like Alta Adams, the acclaimed West Adams restaurant he co-founded with chef Keith Corbin. But with Jacaranda, Patterson’s newest restaurant and first return to fine dining in more than a decade, the story feels more personal than ever. Opened alongside his wife, music industry veteran Sarah Lewitinn, Jacaranda is built around the idea that fine dining can still feel intimate, warm, and alive. The restaurant grew out of the couple’s dinner party-style pop-up, Jaca Social Club, where guests gathered around communal tables inside their Hancock Park home for ambitious tasting menus, strong playlists, and nights that blurred the line between restaurant and house party.
At Jacaranda, Patterson brings together everything he has spent decades refining: modern California cooking, hospitality without pretense, and a sense of emotional connection that runs through every part of the experience. He cooks with the perspective of someone returning to fine dining not to recreate the past, but to build something entirely his own again. What makes this moment exciting is not nostalgia or legacy. It’s the fact that after all these years, he still cooks like someone searching for something new and remains deeply excited about sharing that sense of discovery with others.
