Keith Corbin wasn’t looking for a career as a chef when he went to work for Roy Choi and Daniel Patterson at their Watts neighborhood restaurant, Locol.
“I was just coming home from prison. I had been fired from my other job. It was about paying bills,” he says as he prepares to make a dish inside the Times Test Kitchen from Alta Adams, the acclaimed L.A. restaurant he opened in 2018 with Patterson.
It was at Locol, however, that he went from cook to kitchen manager, then chef in the Bay Area, and started to see new possibilities.
“I had ideas of what the food I grew up eating would be like if I had access to these resources that I was seeing in other areas. Like, what would my brand of food be like if we had Whole Foods or farmers markets? I started imagining the food that I grew up with made with fresh and better ingredients. I pitched that to Daniel, and Alta is the birth of that.”
With Patterson as an advisor, sounding board and business partner, plus a dedicated team of chefs and servers — including former sous chef and Locol alum Gwendolyn Etta, who is now a chef de cuisine in Texas — Corbin has built Alta Adams into a community hub and nationally known destination restaurant.
But don’t get the idea that Corbin’s is a simple prison-to-star-chef redemption tale. As he details in his new memoir, “California Soul” (and will discuss on Aug. 23 for the L.A. Times Book Club), his drug habit plagued him even as he started to carve out a career as a chef and restaurateur.
Chef Keith Corbin will discuss ‘California Soul’ with the L.A. Times Book Club.
Yet for all of his slip-ups, Corbin — with a new baby and a beautiful wife he met in classic rom-com style when she came to eat at Alta — has emerged as a leader and mentor. Each week, young people from the neighborhood are invited to Alta to learn about the possibilities of a culinary career by witnessing how a high-level kitchen works. And at the adjacent Adams Wine Shop, they can see a Black woman, Jaela Salala, in charge of an operation co-founded by the late Ruben Morancy, a certified sommelier and former wine director at Patterson’s now-closed San Francisco restaurant Coi, with the intention of featuring BIPOC and LGBTQ winemakers.
“Coming from Watts, the West Adams community that Alta is in is so similar,” Corbin says. “It’s definitely a underserved community. We wanted to make sure that we connected to the people who were already there [with] the choice of food and also the price point.”
Not to mention the people staffing the restaurant. “We’re really intentional on how we hire and who we hire,” Corbin says. “It’s all about giving chances and opportunity. Because without that, I wouldn’t be here. Not only was I given opportunity, I was supported within that opportunity. Because I wasn’t ready. I didn’t know how to use a knife. I didn’t know what these ingredients were. I probably would have messed up boiling water. I wanted to quit many a time, and, you know, Daniel and the team wouldn’t allow me to quit. They just kept encouraging, encouraging. I was coming from a background where I wasn’t disciplined for this. But here I am.”
For all of the support Corbin received — at one point he says, “I’ve just been a passenger on this ride” — it’s clear as he re-creates Alta’s vegan gombo in the Times Test Kitchen that he has a sure sense of how to layer flavors and textures and incorporate the West African traditions of his enslaved ancestors with the seasonal, local vegetable-driven sensibility that’s come to define what he calls “California soul” cooking.
“We’re in California, right? You gotta have vegan. The vegetables are part of the beautiful bounty that California has. That’s the whole purpose of what we do at Alta — California soul food, right? We took a cuisine that has been around for a long time and reframed it. That means a lot because when I think back about my enslaved ancestors, before they were brought here they cooked what they grew, they cooked what was around them, they cooked what they caught, they cooked what was in season. So we focus on what California produces while following the diaspora from West Africa through the Caribbean, through the South.”
This is why Corbin sees no contradiction in serving his lauded fried chicken or oxtails and rice alongside vegan gombo or a smoked tofu sandwich with spicy tartar sauce and coleslaw.
That gombo — spelled closer to the original West African word for “okra” — uses red miso paste instead of a traditional roux and adds a layer of sautéed or charred or grilled vegetables on top of the vegetable stew, plus a garnish of radish sprouts or pea shoots, depending on what’s in season, for a new kind of dish that tastes of this place while being rooted in tradition.
“All I did was trailblaze a new path to something familiar,” Corbin says. “I remember what things taste like. I remember what my granny used to cook. So I just took my own path to get there using different ingredients and techniques, but trying to stay as authentic as possible.”
Get the recipe:
Keith Corbin's Vegan Gombo (Gumbo)
Book Club: If You Go
What: Keith Corbin joins the L.A. Times Book Club to discuss “California Soul: An American Epic of Cooking and Survival” with Times Food Editor Daniel Hernandez.
When: 7 p.m. PT Aug 23. Doors open at 6 p.m.
Where: ASU California Center, 1111 S. Broadway, Los Angeles. In-person and virtual tickets are available on Eventbrite.
More info: Sign up for the L.A. Times Book Club newsletter, latimes.com/bookclub
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