RESTAURANT NEWS | LOS ANGELES
Sarah Lewitinn and Daniel Patterson Bring Dinner-Party Feels to Los Angeles at Jacaranda
By Mei Chen | 9:45 a.m. ET, May 11, 2026
AUTHOR BIO: Mei Chen has worked for nearly a dozen start-ups in as many years, taking her to several West Coast cities. While she’s sure her current day job is permanent, she also has her eye on Carmel.
Los Angeles has a new tasting-menu restaurant built around a simple question: Can fine dining feel like a dinner party?
At Jacaranda, Sarah Lewitinn and husband Daniel Patterson are trying that in a 30-seat room on Melrose Avenue, where outside the city’s purple trees are doing their annual civic duty and dropping confetti on windshields. The restaurant opened May 6 with a 10-course modern California tasting menu, a $295 price tag, and a promise of elegance without the usual fine-dining choreography that can make dinner feel like a job interview with tweezers.
Patterson gives the restaurant its culinary gravity. He’s the former chef of Coi, which spent 16 years helping to define modern fine dining in San Francisco. Jacaranda marks his first independent L.A. restaurant. Before the opening, Patterson and Lewitinn ran Jaca Social Club out of their home for five months, which explains part of the premise here. This isn’t a chef parachuting into Los Angeles with a tasting menu and a mood board. It’s a restaurant that started around an actual table.
Lewitinn gives Jacaranda its other half. Known in music circles as Ultragrrrl, she built a career in the indie-rock world, including work at Spin Magazine and in the New York music scene. At Jacaranda, that background becomes part of the room rather than a cute line on her résumé. The idea is fine dining with a pulse: a communal table, a host with actual presence, and music that does more than apologize for silence.
The menu leans into Patterson’s long-running fascination with vegetables, texture, and the magic that happens when California produce is treated with seriousness. Early dishes include an artichoke flower course, tofu with seaweed and caviar, Kauai prawns with squash and saffron, stuffed morels with spruce tips, and a raw chocolate dessert with roasted kelp and dates. The wine list stays all-California, with sake, craft beer, and nonalcoholic pairings also available.
Jacaranda arrives at a time when fine dining keeps trying to loosen its collar. San Francisco’s Lazy Bear famously grew out of underground dinner parties and still builds the meal around communal tables and chef-led storytelling. In Brooklyn, Dinner Party leans into the premise right in the name, with a small, seasonally changing restaurant run by friends who describe the work as cooking and hosting in roughly equal measure. Chicago’s Class Act goes even further into the hosted-evening idea, with 16 seats around a communal table and a room meant to feel closer to an apartment kitchen than a hushed dining room. Jacaranda fits into that lineage, though with a very Los Angeles modifier: the dinner party comes with Patterson’s fine-dining résumé, Lewitinn’s rock-world instincts, and a soundtrack that presumably knows better than to whisper.
Jacaranda is open Wednesday through Saturday for dinner, with lunch service also part of the plan. In a city that’s never short on expensive meals, the more interesting bet is whether Patterson and Lewitinn can make a $295 tasting menu feel less like an occasion and more like an invitation.
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