In late September a light-purple square of an Instagram post caught the attention of fans of fine dining all over the world: Chefs Daniel Patterson and Keith Corbin said they would open a new restaurant, Jaca, next year in L.A. It marks Patterson’s return to fine dining after leaving Coi, his Michelin-starred San Francisco restaurant, one of the country’s most influential tasting menu restaurants for nearly 16 years.
In the time since he’s launched Locol , closed Locol , reopened Locol , teamed up with Corbin, opened Alta and created a nonprofit. Now he’s ready to return to fine dining with Corbin in creating Jaca, a Beverly Grove restaurant that the duo hopes to open in the spring. While some details are still to be determined, here are five key things to know about Jaca, including its tandem wine bar, its tasting-menu format and where to find it.
Why Jaca now? “A couple of years ago I felt the energy coming back, and now I’m ready,” Patterson said. “This is what I’ve done my whole life. It’s what I love to do.
So I’m really excited to be able to get back in and do it but in a different way — building on the culture and the community connections that we have developed.” By the time Patterson left Coi in 2015, he’d spent more than two decades running full tilt in professional kitchens, mostly in fine dining. “It was just nonstop, all of the work and the pressure and the 100-hour work week,” he said.
He wanted to focus on the first iteration of .