One of the city’s most celebrated California soul food restaurants just reopened with an even more creative global menu and its co-founder now fully at the helm.
When chefs Keith Corbin and Daniel Patterson debuted Alta in 2018, the restaurant amassed a legion of followers who flocked to West Adams for Watts-raised Corbin’s version of soul food cooked through an L.A. and California-produce lens. In a glowing 2019 review, Los Angeles Times food critic Bill Addison called it “a synergist for conversation around the evolving definition and direction of soul food in America,” and Corbin went on to receive two nods from the James Beard Award Foundation.
But a series of hardships, including the pandemic and severe drops in business after the Palisades and Eaton fires, changed the restaurant to a point that Corbin felt it had “lost its identity.” In 2025, Corbin and Patterson amicably split their partnership, allowing Corbin to fully focus on Alta and Patterson to launch Jacaranda, his own return to fine dining; the duo still operate Locol and their nonprofit, Alta Community, together.
After a year of soul searching, Corbin shuttered his West Adams restaurant in February and returned in late May with a new menu “shaped by migration, memory and fire,” according to Corbin, loosely weaving migration routes — of communities and ingredients — from across the globe. It’s what Corbin feels is “a true representation of L.A.,” and has proved “an awakening” for the chef.
“I started to learn about these cultural collision points in these migrations and trade routes and this big connection between African, Asian, and Mesoamerica or Mexico, and when I thought about it, that’s the same connection that I have right here in L.A.,” Corbin said. “I’m like, well, that’s soul food.”
Now he’s serving dishes such as the West African osso buco, weaving in flavors from Mexico, Asia and the Middle East with scotch bonnets, red palm oil, tomatoes and cinnamon flavoring the coconut braising sauce and its bed of couscous.
Gone is Alta’s signature fried chicken with a vibrant house-made Fresno hot sauce. Gone are the collard greens wrapped in a single leaf and sizzled in smoked oil. Certainly, Corbin is concerned how longtime fans of the restaurant will respond and how much they might miss Alta’s previous dishes, but the chef said he needed to explore and create.
“I don’t want the box of soul food,” Corbin said. “You get a Black chef, they cook, they grow, and you box them into ‘soul food.’ The industry does it, and your own community does it, and then if you try to play with different flavors and techniques within that cuisine, you get beat up about it.”
The chef has always felt connected to food, whether initially by his family’s cooking or his new start in a professional kitchen. After he was released from prison in 2014 — following charges of robbery, drug and gun possession and arson — Corbin was unsure of his professional path. Then, in 2016, he applied to cook at Locol, a community-minded restaurant founded by Patterson and celebrity chef Roy Choi. Corbin excelled in the kitchen and as a leader, becoming an owner of the business, and also embarking on Alta with Patterson.
Alta’s reinvention also felt like a return to the restaurant’s origins, where Corbin was cooking original dishes to order — a process that he felt was taken from him through a string of setbacks.
During the pandemic, Alta flipped its adjacent cafe to a bottle shop, and the restaurant began serving what Corbin characterized as safer cuisine, taking fewer risks to draw in more customers. Entertainment industry strikes further hurt business, and Corbin said in the wake of the Eaton and Palisades fires, Alta would sometimes see only one or two customers at a time.
Corbin stripped down his menu, as well as his format, relying on steam tables to hold batches of fried chicken and other comfort food dishes at temperature instead of cooking to order. Staff introduced programming such as karaoke and trivia nights to attract customers, but Corbin felt it only confused the restaurant’s identity.
Corbin stepped away in February 2025 and briefly cooked at Valle de Guadalupe’s Fauna, then traveled to Europe and explored an array of cuisines, including in Italy, where he took pasta making classes. He saved seeds to plant in L.A. He competed in Padma Lakshmi’s new cooking show, “America’s Culinary Cup.” Reenergized, he got back to work early this year: He’d close Alta and relaunch it, this time without the steam trays and the nightly programming.
“I got bored, I got frustrated, I started feeling trapped. It wasn’t exciting anymore, and so I left the restaurant,” Corbin said, adding, “It was no longer what I envisioned and what I wanted to represent me and the community, and my ability to create. So I closed it.”
In late February, his staff canceled all existing reservations and began preparing for the new vision, which would draw from Corbin’s years of culinary research tracing dishes and ingredients across continents. Since it reopened, Corbin is experimenting with more nuanced and challenging dishes: fish in a Senegalese yassa sauce; bone marrow adorned with pepper-soup-inspired bacon jam and suya spice; charred cabbage with tahini and a kombu-and-tamarind reduction and a harissa-and-white miso glaze.
He followed African and Caribbean ingredients such as plantains back to Southeast Asia, and peanuts to Mesoamerica, and utilized some of those regions’ flavors too. Now, he’s building layers of flavor through what he calls “spice logic”: Which spices and aromatics from various regions and cultures play well together, and how do they evolve together based on techniques such as braising or simmering?
Bar director Madeline McQuillan revamped the beverage program with spirits representative of West Africa, Mexico and Asia, and produce- and location-inspired cocktails such as a sweet-corn spin on a sour or the South Central Cola, made with rum, lime, sparkling water and a house-made cola syrup.
“Now the bar is matching the energy in the kitchen,” Corbin said.
The restaurant’s woodwork, seating, lighting and pillows got a design refresh, incorporating more earth tones and deep pastels. Excited to show guests the new menu, Corbin also revived Alta’s kitchen counter seating, which he’d removed during Alta’s era of steam-tray preparation.
Alta’s tandem bottle shop is slated to reopen in early August, while Alta’s brunch service — which might include some of the signatures such as fried chicken, albeit in new formats — is planned to relaunch in late August.
For those still craving a taste of Alta’s original flavors, Corbin and Patterson will continue their popular line of bottled sauces, Alta Pantry, which includes the popular, currently sold-out Fresno chile hot sauce. Normally, they can be purchased online and at local storefronts such as cookbook shop Now Serving. Some of Alta’s new spices and sauces, such as Corbin’s lacto-fermented garlic powder or date syrup, could also make their way into Alta Pantry in the future.
Alta is located at 5359 W. Adams Blvd., Los Angeles, and open Tuesday to Sunday from 5-10 p.m.
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