How does a chef breathe new life into a restaurant with a deeply established identity after nearly a decade? Keith Corbin started with a bowl of black-eyed peas.
When Corbin opened Alta Adams with former partner Daniel Patterson in 2018, the two billed the West Adams restaurant as California soul cooking. The menu was a distillation of Corbin’s Watts upbringing and a celebration of Black foodways, with inspired riffs on oxtails over rice, some of the best fried chicken in the city, and collard greens supercharged with vinegar and smoked oil in place of the more traditional ham hocks.
Earlier this year, Corbin closed Alta Adams for three months to recalibrate, spending that time traveling and cooking through Mexico and Europe, and competing on the Padma Lakshmi-hosted cooking competition “America’s Culinary Cup.” He reopened in May with a menu that leans deeper into something I’d pinpoint as Angeleno cooking. The Southern soul food bent hasn’t disappeared; instead, it’s seamlessly intertwined like a much loved prequel to each dish on the menu.
To understand Corbin’s evolution, order the black-eyed peas. After spending years transforming the peas into golden fritters at the restaurant, Corbin now presents them as a salad. The beans are braised until tender and creamy, tossed in lime juice that zips around the bowl. Fresno chiles are perky with heat, while fresh cilantro mimics the bright herbaceousness of a fresh salsa. Bits of crisp shredded ham hock act as porky croutons you fish out like buried treasure.
Whatever else lands on the table, your spoon will find its way back to the black-eyed peas.
“Black-eyed peas are important for me, because it’s a dish that represents survival,” says Corbin, referencing the ingredient’s history as a primary source of nutrition for enslaved Africans during the colonial period, and for soldiers and civilians in the South during the Civil War. “But it’s something that can be elevated and stand amongst all these other diets and ingredients.”
Survival is a fitting theme for a restaurant that has shape-shifted numerous times over the past eight years in search of solid ground, and for a chef whose own story of perseverance is ever present in his cooking. Corbin’s culinary career began two years after a prison release, and with no formal training. He secured a job cooking at Locol, Patterson and Roy Choi’s community-focused restaurant in Watts. He and Patterson went on to open Alta Adams, and though Patterson stepped away from the partnership in 2025, the two still run the Alta Community nonprofit together.
Alta Adams 2.0 still feels like a place grounded in its community. The nightly crowd is one of the most diverse in the city, mirroring Corbin’s ongoing mission to establish new connections between the cultures and cuisines of Los Angeles, and to create a new identity for himself outside of the constraints of traditional soul food.
This is partly what propels his mole demi-glace, a convergence of inspirations realized in a duck and smoked chicken stock sharpened by the foundational components of mole. The stocks are combined into an umami-blasted reduction over a multi-day process with pepitas, raisins, tomatoes, carrots, onions, chiles, star anise and cinnamon, then finished with Mexican chocolate, black garlic, molasses and vinegar. The resulting sauce is glossy enough to spy your reflection in its jet black depths, refined yet powerful with its distinct wallop of deep, earthy flavors. You drag the duck leg confit through the sauce, interchanging bites with the crispy potatoes that crowd the plate.
Corbin uses cabbage as an anchor in his new and expanding Rolodex of flavors, thrusting it into the fire until the outer layers are blackened and frizzled. He paints the leaves with a mixture of harissa and miso, marrying the warmth of the North African chile paste beautifully with the salinity of the fermented Japanese condiment. The cabbage wedge sits over a fluffy whip of tahini and labneh, all served beneath a crush of peanuts.
While I’m still reeling from the disappearance of Corbin’s excellent fried chicken, I’ve found solace in the new grilled chicken, marinated in a tagine spice and the chef’s signature brisket rub. The chicken hits with a peppery snap, citrusy and resinous with a trace of fenugreek lurking in the background. But the char and sweet, caramelized edges register as Southern barbecue.
Corbin mined the flavor profile of West African pepper soup for his roasted bone marrow with flatbread. The bones are covered in a sandy bacon jam hot with suya spice heightened with West African black pepper. They’re finished with a West African nutmeg vinaigrette lush with African palm oil.
Bar director Madeline McQuillan oversees the new beverage program, highlighting spirits and ingredients from Mexico, West Africa and Asia. Libations lean sweet, with drinks like the Sweet Corn, made with Baby Jane heirloom corn bourbon and corn syrup. And the Peaches and Pea, a drink that teeters on the edge of cloying, heavy-handed with peach oleo-saccharum.
If you prefer to reserve your sugar spike for the end of dinner, splurge on the $26 banana split. It’s an homage to the neighborhood ice cream trucks Corbin frequented as a kid. He prepares his own banana and chocolate ice creams, scooped onto a plate with brûléed bananas, bourbon miso caramel and crunchy shards of pecan brittle. I don’t know what Corbin was eating on his ice cream truck, but it must have been better than anything on mine.
In its latest iteration, Alta Adams isn’t just surviving, it’s hitting its stride. And with Corbin’s new direction, the restaurant feels like a love letter to the city that gave him the opportunity to thrive.
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