East Hollywood restaurant Sqirl is trending after photo of “mold-filled jam bucket” is posted

Ok so there’s a little mold there. But what the hell is a jam bucket? Jam doesn’t belong in a bucket.

the cake is a lie.

The owner has been featured on Goop and The NY Times and has a cookbook coming out soon

A small bowl of jam is set at the table with each order, any remaining jam is returned to the bucket.

It's blue cheese jam. Hipsters will love it.

R1 So this place is known for their jam, apparently. Turns out they weren't making it in the restaurant kitchen but in a hidden kitchen which wasn't checked by health inspectors. In fact employees say they were locked in this hidden kitchen with the lights turned off when the health inspector showed up.

Anyway, they stored the jam they made improperly, leading to it growing a crust of mold. The owner would tell them to scrape off the mold and dump it into the mold bucket - which is what was pictured.

She's since posted in Twitter (linked) claiming it's all okay and perfectly safe and approved....and despite this they'll now be changing their processes. Which raises the obvious question of it was all perfectly safe, why change?

never jam today!

Employees were locked in the secret mold factory with the lights off while the health inspector visited

If this is true, they should be shut down immediately.

Please welcome to the stage: MOLDY JAMBUCKET

Have they identified who traveled from Sqirl to Wuhan?

Disgusting. 🤮

'moldy jambucket' is definitely going to be my new affectionate nickname for my whoohah

Fruit-forward?

also, are restaurants allowed to put used food back in comingled circulation? wtf?

Whatever this is it is pure fuckery.

Someone called the Health Department, and STAT!

Sqirl quotes mycologist, gets dissed.

Overpriced, overrated place. Sort of glad to see it get its comeuppance.

That owner looks "special"

Squirrel?

R21, squirrel droppings are part of the jam recipe apparently.

She seems to be a disgusting individual.

There are people who put greater effort into subterfuge and deception than is required for actual honesty and compliance.

They get off on getting away with things.

For example, the kid in HS who would rig elaborate mechanisms to cheat on a final, when studying for it would have been much easier and taken less time. Or the guy with another wife and family in another state.

Secret kitchens? Employees hiding with the lights off? Wouldn’t it be easier to clean the real kitchen and store the jam properly? Put a lid on it and put it in the refrigerator. How hard is that?

I guess this chick quenches her desire for risk by cloak-and-dagger jam fuckery instead of doing drugs or rough trade.

Jam Fuckery! New band name!

I just lost my appetite for dining out, and that's not what restaurants desperate to reopen want to hear.

What *I* want to read is the collective and individual outrage expressed by decent restaurateurs in opposition to their nasty colleague's practices.

Off topic but I wonder what happened to that vegan restaurant with the naked kid running around presenting hole. Maybe that story can be fashioned into a new distraction forQAnon.

Why not put that jam in the refrigerator?

R27, haha. That kid is probably in middle school and running around without a mask.

R28, the whole thing sounded odd. What was the point of the secret, non-Health inspection-regulated kitchen?

R30 Please read the article to learn not only about Jam Fuckery, but Kitchen Fakery as well. She admitted to some intentional Fuckery once the other other litchen fell off the Health Department's radar. She intentionally took advantage of that, and moved the jam "buckets" into that space.

This woman is absolutely too dumb to own and run any sort of eatery; she's endangering health. By now, she has probably completely colonised that kitchen with these spores. Something like this festering in the dark creates a cheese cave like inoculation from my understanding. Fucking idiot. She should be barred from having a licence for any food related businesses.

I find it helpful with my recurring problems.

It's like she's running an off-licence bioweapons lab there, or trying to discover the next new antibiotic.

R31, yikes. This restaurant was a pretty big deal -- any time I'd ever driven by, it had lines out the door, wrapping around the corner. Kinda doubt she will recover from this. And she just came out with a jam recipe cookbook!

I want to say something really unnecessary and politically incorrect, but I'm going to resist.

Will GOOP next suggest ladies slather their cooters with Sqril's spore-infused jam and pronounce it a technique "ahead of its time"?

I can't wait to read the Amazon reviews of the book.

[quote]There are people who put greater effort into subterfuge and deception than is required for actual honesty and compliance.

I'm flummoxed by these people, R24, and see examples every day of individuals working far, far harder to work outside the rules than to work within them, all for the complicated pleasure of having escaped convention.

I try to not to wish I'll upon too very many people, but may this woman be fed the scum from moldy jam buckets until she buckled over green and vows a lifetime of repentance and poverty.

R34 Some of her previous chefs claim she stole all the credit for their recipes in that book. This cunt is a very mouldy shyster, though everyone thought she was really a fungal.

In a shocking twist of "only in 2020" irony, had the mold-filled jam bucket been allowed to fester a mere additional 24 hours from the time it was discovered and destroyed, it would have produced the new strain of penicilin capable of destroying the Coronavirus.

My dirty ol' moosehoof

my fuzzy mimosa

My Downtown Snacketarium

My Mos Def

My Busy Furlough

My Mold-filled Jam Bucket

You don't [italic]even[/italic] want to know what went into the Bloody Marys...

There are apparently quite a few things Goop doesn’t know anything about, besides acting.

I hope Goop ate there.

What other kitchen secrets were lurking there?

And here's your first snarky Amazon review (well, the title anyway):

[quote]1.0 out of 5 stars Subpar leader and chef makes Moldy jam & creates jam cook book. Reviewed in the United States on July 24, 2020 PSA - See title and washington post story.

Well, this video didn't age well. No mention of the mold bucket.

Sqirl. Death.

R27, that thread was bumped recently. The restaurant is still open, PoopieBitch is still making their cakes, and there's a hole new baby getting ready to pick up where the last one left off.

That looks positively vile.

The IG page of 'Squirla' is pages of apologies and explanations and laboratory tests of samples of potted jam.

Beyond that they have stripped the comments from recent threads...but much older threads, not, so the expected comments are piling up.

"We came for the mold!"

"America, the home of the moldy jam"

Somewhere in LA she's screaming at an underpaid "social media guru" and her blood vessels are popping. How does she think she is going to climb out from under this? Saved baby testing lab reports of no mold in *these* jars of jam? Saved by cookbook sales? Explaining the secret kitchen as a mere oversight?

*Shared (not "Shared baby". ffs)

I worked as a waiter in a small hotel for a year when I was younger and NO ONE in the staff would've served customers anything that had mold in it. The only food issue we had during my stay there was when we accidentally served pie with undercooked meat inside and that was all our cook's fault. He was a cunt; loud, nasty and scary, but he was mortified that unsafe food slipped through his fingers. It was quite satisfying seeing him grovel before the absolutely irate hotel manager since it was the only time that ever happened but that just goes to show how serious the incident was.

It's totally mind-boggling that anyone sane working in the restaurant industry would serve something as vile as moldy jam to the customers.

Their jam is awful

One of the first photos in her first cookbook is of a woman standing at the counter, fingers entangled in waist-length hair, making a ponytail.

She was trying to tell you THEN that basic hygiene or food safety wouldn’t matter NOW.

David Chang raves about their jam which makes me LOL because I loathe him.

She can always get a job in the kitchen at Mar-a-Slagheap

She sells her jams for $14 and bragged in an interview that the business brought in $7,000 on a slow day.

According to her cooks, she never cooked, just added garnishes at the end. The cook who made her farro bowl (and her husband responsible for the ricotta & jam toast), opened her own place:

HAHA this bitch left the sugar out of her jam to make it aspirational for Goop and her band of health freaks. Now their organic bodies are riddled with mold. I love!

At this point, she should just own it and say that the mold is what gave her jams their distinctive flavor.

Well, mold IS organic.

Yes r61, like cheese. I don't know much about it, how do we not get sick from those kinds of cheeses?

Nasty. I hope her business tanks.

You just don’t do that. You NEVER mess with people’s food. Never.

^ and I’m one who will cut the moldy part off cheese, and eat yogurt past its sell-by date and eat foods that have been on the counter all night. (I have a cast-iron stomach.)

But that’s MY choice.

This article sort of lays it all out there. Sounds like the moldy jam was the least contentious thing happening in that restaurant.

The thing is she could have avoided the mold if she had cleaned the secret kitchen occasionally. It sounded filthy.

God, I’d like to get Gordon Ramsay in there.

Jessica Koslow complimented the recipe creator/cook Ria Barbosa (who otherwise got little credit for creating Sqirl’s signature dish) by comparing her to Stella Mozgawa of the band Warpaint which is the most hipster cliche thing I’ve ever heard.

Barbosa is of Asian descent to boot, which adds another level of hilarity. Koslow could not get any more “white gentrifying millennial girl boss” if she tried.

Gwyneth and Oprah always get tangled up with these fraud people. Being a lifestyle maven is a treacherous business.

The only time Mothra Stewart got in any sort of trouble was that insider trading thing, and she served her time like a champ.

Martha is O.G. That's why Snoop likes her.

Interestingly, her husband is an LA County Deputy District Attorney...

That look in r3 screams: “Not only am I better than you, but you would freak out if you knew what you are eating”

R67, my forthcoming autobiography is entitled [italic]My Secret Kitchen Has Mould[/italic], so please cease and desist. I don't want anyone conflating my pussy with the photo at OP, even though I admit there is a very strong resemblance. It just confuses the consumer.

You'll be hearing from my lawyer.

^^I meant to write 'confusing' but, happily, 'conflating' works as well if you catch me the right week!

Ah, this brings back memories. My first job as a teenager, working for a local bakery chain. The location I worked at actually had two bakery counters: one in the Target store, another in the Applebaums grocery store sharing the same building. Behind that bakery counter was the back bakery, where the cakes, pastries, etc were actually made.

When I worked the counter in the grocery store, I'd also do some prep work in the back for the baking that'd take place later that night. The back bakery was an absolute hole: sink drains perpetually clogged, floor drain perpetually clogged, floor always had a pool of stinky water surrounding the drain, dirty dough hanging in strings from the ceiling where the bakers and cleanup boys would throw it in their dough-sticking contests. I'd watch the bakers mixing up batches of frosting in the gigantic floor mixers, hanging over the large bowls with cigarettes dangling from their lips. Yeah, ash fell in. They didn't care.

But the worst part was the baking pans and the five gallon buckets of fillings: custard, jam, chocolate fillings, all with thick layers of mold on top. They didn't refrigerate those buckets, and it got damn hot back there, so the mold grew rapidly. And the baking pans... they were indescribably foul. Thick with green, fluffy mold growing on the crumbs from the previous batch of baked goods.

First time I encountered the moldy pans, I bought some dish soap from the grocery and set about scrubbing all the pans clean, then drying them before greasing them. And then I left a long indignant note for the manager and bakery supervisor, reporting the disgusting state of the pans. Next day, they told me to just go ahead and grease the dirty, moldy pans. They didn't care (except when the health inspector was coming, which they always got tipped off in advance about).

The place was a real pit - and like I said, it was part of a big local chain. So I wouldn't be surprised if conditions were the same in their other bakeries.

What I took away from that was: if you're eating out, or eating food prepared in a commercial kitchen, there's a good likelihood the conditions in that kitchen would make you feel ill if you saw it. So either don't think about it, or don't eat out.

r69 I have to say I have been chuckling about MOTHRA Stewart since I read it. WE know what a dragon lady she is, but now she's a true flying monster. Thanks for brightening up a dull evening.

[quote] Jessica Koslow complimented the recipe creator/cook Ria Barbosa (who otherwise got little credit for creating Sqirl’s signature dish) by comparing her to Stella Mozgawa of the band Warpaint which is the most hipster cliche thing I’ve ever heard.

R68, that cracked me up.

I have a BF who does the overnight baking at a Dunkin. Sometimes I go by and burn a few with him and we have monkey sex all over the place.

I digress though. The place is relatively clean. The donuts come in frozen and all he does is bake and dress them. The fillings and toppings come in sealed buckets. There is often water on the floor, but not from the day before.

I fucking love that story! Hilarious!

[quote]I have a BF who does the overnight baking at a Dunkin. Sometimes I go by and burn a few with him and we have monkey sex all over the place.

So that donut glaze aint just sugar r78?

One thing I'm not sure is fair to pick on the Sqirl chef about is the lack of recipe credit she extends to her staff. That sucks, but do popular chefs ever give credit for food and recipes to the kitchen staff? The executive chef/owner almost always takes credit for a restaurant's success while it's the sous chef and line cooks churning out the food, etc.

R81: No doubt you are right in that this isn't the first time kitchen staff have developed recipes that the restaurant owner takes credit for. Still, it's easy to be generous with credit and name the people who developed a star recipe. Cookbook authors have been doing this forever and there's no crime in it, when you adapt a friend's recipe or, as in this case, use a recipe that you paid someone to develop for you. Not citing the contributions of key people and not keeping them happy in their jobs, however, while you boast of making money hand over fist and practically stealing the cheapest retail space in L.A., and while you shuffle the kitchen staff in "the other kitchen" and turn off the lights and tell them to be be very quiet while the inspectors have a look over the front kitchen. THat's before ordering your staff to scrapeface the fucking disgusting mold off your vomitous concoction then charge $14 and $15 for a 7.75oz. pot.

She could easily have given some credit and kept her key staffers happy, but look at that face of hers: Is that a face that makes many people happy?

[quote]She could easily have given some credit and kept her key staffers happy, but look at that face of hers: Is that a face that makes many people happy?

"Sqirl" was obviously inspired by her rodentoid mug.

R81, blaming Koslow for not always crediting the recipe certainly seems overblown since that's just the way it is in various businesses. Her pretending to be a chef when she apparently was not involved in the food preparation practically at all however seems kinda shitty. Especially since she was nominated for various chef prizes and won many of them. That is not ok. She was practically the manager and owner of the restaurant who never cooked but still was lauded for being a masterful chef. I assume that is where the bitching about not crediting the recipes is coming from. I'm sure she's worked hard doing what she does at the restaurant but being a real chef was not her job.

R82, R84, oh I have no doubt she was a shitty and entitled boss. And it's not like she messed up just once -- she made so many stupid mistakes over the years, like insulting the neighborhood she was in.

She was like the hipster Tracy Flick of the cooking world.🤣

Shqirl.

I hate jam, so I would never have understood the hype or appeal of a place like this in the first place. As an aside, why are these restaurants so popular? Avocado toast? Ricotta with jam? On toast. These are the things I make at home when I'm desperate, and people go to restaurants for them? I don't get it.

Ha r87, I was facetiming with a friend while I was eating breakfast (avocado toast), and he asked me what restaurant I was at...I said, "Home?", and he replied, "Avocado toast! So Fancy!", and I looked at him like he had 3 heads. What is so hard about mashing up some avocado on toast with sliced cherry tomato garnish?

Goop after she eats this moldy slop!

Don't look at me like I have three heads, bitch. I screencapped your humble 'sliced cherry-tomato garnish'.

In high school I worked as a dishwasher at a seafood restaurant (not super high end, but more expensive than most) where they had a giant heated drawer in the kitchen where they'd recycle the uneaten dinner rolls off people's tables.

That and they had a giant vat of iceberg lettuce that the waitresses would reach in with their dirty hands and make the salad (plate of iceberg, two cucumber slices, two rings of an onion, and two tomato wedges-YUM!). The owners of that place were penny pinching misers, but they did make a shit ton of money off nickel and diming their food and exploiting cheap labor. Hooray for capitalism!!!

The point of my ranting is that it's probably best not to know what goes on behind the scenes at most restaurants.

[quote] The point of my ranting is that it's probably best not to know what goes on behind the scenes at most restaurants.

R91, you can say that again!

[quote] The point of my ranting is that it's probably best not to know what goes on behind the scenes at most restaurants.

R91, you can say that again!

No, r80 it is.

But the custard.......

Her business partner pulled out of her other Santa Monica restaurant, Onda. Yikes.

Haha, look at the two faces in R95's link. Whose food would you rather eat? The one whose face displays competence and curiosity and warmth? Or the one who displays a nervous calculation and smugness at getting away with things far above her talents?

Cámara's statement reminds me of (I think it was) Mandy Patinkin who once took out a series of classified notices to the general effect of: I did not reccomend the work of XYZ Home Renovation Contractors who did, in fact, 'work' on my apartment.

R96, Koslow is a hack. If she identified herself as a restauranteur with some homemade recipes -- rather than a chef -- she could have avoided a lot of problems. I do give her credit for being able to plaster her name everywhere, expand her business, and find her niche customer -- hipster white women willing to spend money on overpriced foods.

The restaurant is named after a rodent. Moldy jams aside, the name is enough to keep me away.

She looks like a rodent.

At least she promises to throw away the moldy jam from now on.

Sounds like she's learned her lesson.

I'm no longer concerned.

From R100's link:

[Quote]Koslow also explains the “secret kitchen” referred to in a lot of the alleged online accusations...[that] secondary kitchen, which was initially permitted to operate in 2013 and eventually became the adjacent Sqirl Away, never received an official health inspection from the county health department. [bold]This was done because the business was unable to receive a bank loan to finish construction of the separate space, and because Koslow needed to “focus on keeping the lights on.”[/bold] So, Koslow says she took “advantage of the oversight” and continued to operate the secondary kitchen knowing full well it wasn’t licensed to operate as a commercial kitchen.

For fuck's same, her first priority should be serving safe food and not endangering her clients and staff, not paying the fucking light bill and keeping her income stream flowing...for six fucking years???

If this were an episode of Midsomer Murders (and how I wish it were), this vile bitch would have her head pulled out of a moldy jam bucket by a coroner in the opening seven minutes.

The list of suspects would be huge.

Someone tagged MOLD LADY on the restaurant!

I hate to admit it, but there was one thing Sqirl had that I really enjoyed: the vegan crispy rice bowl (I eat meat but this was the only thing that appealed to me on their menu). I cannot find a similar dish anywhere else, and trust me, I've tried.

Haven't been in a long time because quite frankly, the customers were assholes, and I don't frequent the area it's in. This story obviously puts me off of them forever, but I do kind of miss that damn crispy rice.

[R105] I bet you any money the original chef, Ria Barbosa, might know how to make it at her restaurant Petite Peso - read the article at [R59] -- one of the pics shows rice bowls on the menu.

R105 In what way were the customers assholes? Do you have a pic of the vegan crispy rice bowl?

Just ignore the crusty jar at #15.

From the menu:

[quote]Crispy Vegan Add avocado, shu greens, no egg

Clearly I am not cut out for California.

Avocado is my one allergy so I avoid it, but before realizing that I liked it just passably. It wasn't bad especially, just a texture I don't like relative how very mild the flavor is. If I decline something avocado and am pressed to explain, Californians and west coasters will give a little pained sigh, "Oooooh! poor thing!" "I don't know what I would eat" or "That's such a shame, wow."

Can't say that these bowls of food look very appealing, and a half avocado dumped into the chow bowl doesn't make it any more enticing.

Better than a bucket of moldy jam, but not by much.

Her Instagram has banned comments and her latest post is her raving over her new Jam recipe book.

I just find it annoying that some hipster douche comes along and makes a big hoopla about a random food and it becomes the subject of worship for a while and the hipster douche is credited with a revival of that particular thing. “The Woman Who Revolutionized Custard” “Why We Eat Bean Sprouts Again” “Bone Marrow’s Renaissance” “A New Take on Pickles”

I’m waiting for these geniuses to discover switchel. Maybe one of you trendy cunts will make it happen.

And in this case, R112, her astounding discovery is fucking toast and jam.

Revolutionary.

r113 She couldn't help it, her earworm at the time was the song "I Like Peanut Butter."

'I like peanut butter, I like toast and jam....."