At Jacaranda, Daniel Patterson Rebuilds Fine Dining on His Own Terms

“Take Me Out”

Patterson and Corbin started hosting pandemic pop-ups on the patio of Alta Adams in 2020, inviting culinary luminaries like Dominique Crenn, John Yao, and Miles Thompson to join them for a series of tasting menus. The success of those dinners led the duo to explore a new fine dining concept together. Patterson would lead the kitchen, focusing on an evolution of the cooking style he developed at Coi. They landed on the former Son of a Gun space in 2023 and began fundraising for a concept called Jaca, inspired by the jacaranda trees flowering when they first visited Alta Adams.

During the development of the concept, Lewitinn and Patterson began hosting Shabbat dinners out of their Hancock Park house. Started in response to the October 7 attacks in Israel, the idea was to create a safe space for Jews while normalizing Jewish traditions through food for people unfamiliar with the culture. Serving Egyptian Mizrahi dishes based on Lewitinn’s family recipes, a crowd favorite was bamia, pungently sweet okra slowly simmered in tomatoes. What began as a dinner for forty people quickly grew into a gathering of a hundred every Friday, pushing Lewitinn into a de facto hosting role.

“Daniel would be in the kitchen and I was like, ‘Don’t talk to him, please don’t bother him. He’s making food for a hundred people because I told him there were fifty,’” Lewitinn reflected.

“Our Time”

The timing for Jaca was marked by endless trials and tribulations. The pandemic lingered, the writers’ strike stalled the city, and the restaurant scene in LA kept shifting under everyone’s feet. When the funding for the restaurant never fully materialized, Patterson and Corbin knew their partnership had to evolve.

“We were cheering each other on, rooting for each other to follow our own paths,” Corbin reflected. “Daniel would grumble about missing being in the kitchen. Alta being my place, we just decided, fuck it, let’s get you back in the kitchen.”

They let go of the Son of a Gun space and the idea of doing Jaca together. Corbin set out to redefine Alta’s menu as California soul food shaped by migration, memory, and fire, while Patterson focused on creating an opportunity to get himself back in the kitchen.

The Shabbat dinners had wound down, Lewitinn was burnt out from hosting, but Patterson felt reenergized. “I really just needed all of this time until whatever this energy is, it just grows and grows until it’s overflowing,” he shared. Even though the money for Jaca had never materialized, Patterson was still set on opening the concept he and Corbin had developed. Newly renamed Jacaranda, he knew he needed a runway to reestablish himself in the world of fine dining.

“I know there’s plenty of people who have eaten Coi or LocoL, but in LA, by and large, I’m starting from ground zero,” he disclosed. “And that’s exciting. I can’t depend on anything I’ve done in the past.”

He also knew any future project wouldn’t feel complete without Lewitinn leading the front of house. “I have no experience in hospitality. I was in denial that I would be a part of this, and was looking for a job,” she explained. “He kept telling me, ‘You already have a job, we are going to do this restaurant together.’”

So in 2025, after a year of closing their home to the public, they reopened the doors as Jaca Social Club.

“Out of the Races and Onto the Tracks”

Jaca Social Club hit the ground running. “Sometimes you go to these fine dining experiences that are so buttoned up, so refined, it feels so much like a show that you start wondering who is comfortable here? Who’s actually enjoying themselves?” Lewitinn asked. Bringing her Lower East Side party energy to the front of a $250 tasting menu allowed her to dismantle the “museumification” of fine dining.

For Patterson, returning to this world without investors, critics, or the pressure of permanence was deeply motivating. Being able to modify dishes weekly, work with different farmers market vendors, and rework techniques allowed the menu to develop organically. One offering, silky soft tofu topped with caviar and brackish seaweed, got its start in his Hancock Park kitchen before eventually making its way onto the menu at Jacaranda.

“The pop-up did two things,” Patterson explained. “One, we got feedback. And two, which I didn’t expect, was seeing how magical it was for a group of people who didn’t know each other to get together and have dinner in our home.”

“Feel It All Around”

Not wanting to go through the painful experience of hunting for investors, Patterson and Lewitinn bet on themselves, investing all of their savings into the buildout and launch of Jacaranda. “It had to work this way,” Lewitinn explained. “If it didn’t, that’s okay. I’ve had a lot of things fail. Daniel’s had a lot of things fail, and it’s not the end of the world.”

After finding an almost turnkey space on Melrose in Hollywood, with a dining room small enough to maintain the feeling of a house party, they got to work building it out themselves. Echoing the lavender blooms of the jacaranda trees that blanket Los Angeles each spring, they designed the restaurant’s walls to evoke that same soft warmth. A Calder-esque sculpture inspired by the tree’s leaves adorned the ceiling, while paintings from Lewitinn’s great-uncle, Landès Lewitin, lined the walls. After a six-week sprint, and just in time for the blooming of the trees across LA, Jacaranda was ready for a two-week run of Friends and Family.

“I Wanna Be Adored”

Walking into the sixth night of Friends and Family, Jacaranda already had the hum of an established restaurant. That could be attributed to the repetitions from Jaca Social Club, or the fact that Patterson brought in chefs from Coi, Matthew Tinder and Andrew Miller, to help run the line. While the kitchen was relatively quiet, it wasn’t without communication. Every word was intentional and respectful. When the yuba skin failed to detach cleanly from the Silpat it had been prepped on, Patterson and his line cooks worked through the issue in real time. “It’s frustrating,” Patterson lamented. “We haven’t quite figured out the timing on this.”

Corbin, in the role of diner for the evening, swung by the pass to praise the team. “I’m rooting for them,” he boasted. “I’m proud of them and salute them for making this happen.” As The Stone Roses’ “I Wanna Be Adored” drifted into the kitchen from Lewitinn’s playlist, Patterson reflected on how he felt heading into the second week of previews.

“We’ve worked very hard to get to a certain level. We are starting there, and are going up. I’m feeling great. My body is just getting used to it again.”

“Turn On The Bright Lights”

Lewitinn, resplendent in a self-made dress fashioned out of leftover napkin material and safety pins, welcomed guests like old friends. “Every night I get dressed up for service so I can bring a little razzle dazzle to the dining room, and encourage others to do the same.” She greeted each guest as though they were entering her home, guiding tours through the space and showing off Adele Renault’s custom jacaranda branch painting stretched across one wall.

As the room filled, it became clear that Jacaranda’s atmosphere was a direct extension of what they had built in their home. With only one seating a night, the thirty guests were encouraged to settle into the environment. As the front-of-house team effortlessly floated through the dining room, refined dishes emerged from the kitchen. Delicately grilled vermilion snapper, paired with a tender steamed Kauai prawn wrapped in a squash blossom atop a saffron puddle, put my dining companion in a state of muted awe. Earthy morels stuffed with an opulent morel chicken mousse made me rethink my entire relationship with mushrooms. And when the savory portion of the meal crescendoed during the instrumental outro of Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer,” a pepper-crusted duck breast floating in a lake of roasted blueberry jus and served with an earthy bone broth made my soul officially leave my body.