When Jessica Koslow put together her first rice bowl a couple of years ago, she wasn’t looking to start a trend. She just wanted to be able to offer something a little different to her customers at her East Hollywood restaurant, Sqirl.
Now, of course, rice bowls, their near-cousins grain bowls and even the distantly related porridge bowls are just about the most happening menu items in Southern California.
“What is a sandwich?” Koslow pondered recently while preparing a rice bowl in her Silver Lake neighborhood home. “It is really just protein between two buns. I think people want more lunch options than that these days. The grain bowl is a lot more flexible. It’s a new kind of lunch.”
Just as the basic framework of the sandwich can be adapted almost endlessly to fit any number of ingredients and tastes, so it is with the grain bowl. That’s particularly true in a district like Silver Lake, where customers often have very specific tastes and demand a certain culinary flexibility even from their favorite restaurants.