California soul An American epic of cooking and survival

Keith Corbin, 1980-

Book - 2022

"Before becoming executive chef and part owner of the California soul food restaurant Alta Adams in West LA, Keith Corbin had spent a quarter of his life in prison. Renowned as the best cook of crack cocaine in Los Angeles, Corbin more or less raised himself on the streets of Watts, learning to cook crack when he was only thirteen. He knew he was doing it right if it had the consistency of the roux his granny made for her gumbo. It was a violent business-one that eventually landed Corbin in prison, where his skills at the stove gained him a reputation for making good food out of the normally unbearable prison diet. When after his release he takes a job as a line cook in a famous chef's new restaurant, Corbin is ready to lay low an...d leave gang life behind. Little did he know, his skill at the stove coupled with his determination to escape a life in the streets would eventually catapult him into the kitchens of some of the most acclaimed restaurants around the country, cooking food by day, crack by night just to get by. But success would change that, and in California Soul, Corbin shares the remarkable story of his culinary initiation. From swapping oxtail recipes with Jay-Z to packing heat at brunch and becoming a press-friendly human-interest piece for well-meaning gentrifiers, Corbin's story challenges the stereotype of rags-to-riches success and shows that as a Black man in America, there is no magic door to mainstream respectability. And even if there was, Corbin's not so sure he'd want to walk through it. Told in an unforgettable voice from a rising culinary star unlike any before, California Soul is the astonishing true story of Corbin's journey from the streets and back again, and a testament to the lifechanging power of making the most with what you're given"--

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Subjects
Genres
Autobiographies
Biographies
Anecdotes
Published
New York : Random House [2022]
Language
English
Main Author
Keith Corbin, 1980- (author)
Other Authors
Kevin (Food writer) Alexander (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
x, 306 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm
ISBN
9780593243824
Contents unavailable.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In this exhilarating saga of drugs, crime, and culinary passion, Corbin traces his remarkable rise from a life behind bars to a successful career as a chef. Born, quite literally, into the "drug game" ("my uncle used to carry me around and sell drugs out of my diaper"), Corbin's cooking began with making crack in his teens, a skill that eventually grew into an enterprise with Corbin and his partner shipping drugs around the country. It wasn't until Corbin landed in prison at age 23 that his culinary path began. Working in the prison kitchen, Corbin found an escape while also honing his craft: "I tried to tweak... until I got the best fucking spread you'd ever tried." After six years in prison, Corbin was released in 2010, and got a job as a line cook at a high-end fast-food joint in his L.A. neighborhood. Though he went on to become the chef and face of Alta Adams, a fine-dining restaurant in the city, Corbin reveals his path to success as an ex-felon was far from easy, and it's his brutally candid depiction of "what it's like to grow up Black in America under some of the worst circumstances" that makes this story of perseverance hit hard. Readers shouldn't miss this. (Aug.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

South Central L.A.-raised Corbin narrates his remarkable memoir about culinary success with brutal honesty and a flair for storytelling. Corbin grew up in Watts, where his grandmother cooked for the neighborhood in a kitchen full of soul-food staples; this upbringing spawned a lifelong love of food. From a young age, Corbin was surrounded by gang culture and drugs, beginning to cook crack as a teenager, and eventually ending up in prison. While incarcerated, Corbin worked in the kitchen, honing his craft and later landing a job at Locol, the innovative restaurant founded by Roy Choi and Daniel Patterson, meant to offer good food at low prices in food deserts. Corbin's husky and emotive narration of the audiobook showcases his vulnerability, especially when discussing his struggles with addiction. Corbin's tone and delivery are self-aware. He's careful not to lean on a conventional redemption arc but instead fesses up to moments of self-sabotage with a healthy serving of curse words. Peppered with rebukes of mass incarceration and institutionalized racism, the memoir's genuine emotion resonates. VERDICT Corbin's gritty and forthright book is perfect for fans of chef memoirs like Notes from a Young Black Chef and Kitchen Confidential.--Lizzie Nolan

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

How a Watts gang member escaped doom and ascended to the helm of a nationally acclaimed restaurant. "The book you're about to read," writes Corbin in the prologue, "isn't a gangland morality tale or a prisoner-makes-good drama or a chef memoir that paints my life as a 'uniquely American' success story." However, it offers all of those elements and more. The author also presents a loving history of the Watts neighborhood; a tribute to a beloved grandmother who fed a whole community; a mouthwatering account of the evolution of Corbin's style of soul-food cooking, now featured at Alta in West Adams, Los Angeles; and a candid story about long-term drug dependency. Among the many interesting points made by this modern version of a Horatio Alger story is that for Black youth in America's poor communities, the story is not necessarily rags to riches. If you're in the drug game in your early teens (Corbin started cooking crack at 13), access to piles of cash is never a problem. Ultimately, it's not about money; it's about social mobility. Too often, many doors lead to prison, which is where Corbin spent most of his 20s. Some of the most intriguing parts of the book are the details on the operation, genealogy, and grammar of gangs. For example, Crips will spell the word back as bacc: "No Crip sets use the letters c and k together," writes Corbin, because that formulation, in that context, means "Crip killer." There are two primary heroes of this story, capably preserved and shaped by James Beard Award--winning journalist Alexander: Corbin himself and his mentor, the restaurateur Daniel Patterson, whose commitment to actually doing something for Corbin--and many others coming out of incarceration and looking for direction--is rare indeed. A personable account of hard-won success, heartening in some ways, sobering in others, and served with tasty sides. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Part One Family Business When some people say they grew up in the drug game, they mean it metaphorically. That's not what I mean. My mom spent part of her pregnancy with me in jail on a drug charge. When I was a baby, my uncle used to carry me around and sell drugs out of my diaper. When I was a little kid, I lived in a drug house with my mother in the Jordan Downs projects, in Watts, until it was raided by the police. So, when I say I grew up in the drug game, this shit ain't an allegory. I mean it literally. I grew up in the drug game. My mother, Lydia Garner, was one of eight kids and rebellious from a young age. Though she spent a lot of years living with her deeply religious grandmother, by the time she was fifteen, she had been kicked out of her house for buying a pair of Levi's 501 jeans--church rules said girls couldn't wear pants--and ended up moving in with her aunt. With weekend-long poker games and people always coming through drinking and partying, my aunt's house had a completely different vibe, and my mom began to assimilate to that lifestyle. Her cousin Bertie Jo was a drug legend, famous in Watts for two things: (1) having the only private swimming pool in Watts; and (2) creating and controlling the PCP trade in South Central in the 1970s and '80s. Just to be clear, that pool wasn't used for swimming. It takes lots of liquids to make PCP. As a teenager, my mother started selling PCP for her cousin and witnessed up close the power, influence, and money at the top of the drug food chain. She saw bribes get delivered to judges, policemen, and anyone else whose wheels needed greasing. She saw fancy cars, clothes, and jewelry. But she also saw the dark side of the game. After a disagreement with her cousin over money, she was almost killed when a man beat her up and tried to give her a "hot shot" of heroin in the neck, to make it look like she'd overdosed. Thankfully, she's always been a fighter. She fought off that man and had no problem fighting anyone else, man or woman, who might cross her. People didn't expect that from a slim, pretty girl with a big smile. My mom was, and still is, an alpha--more so than most men. She had a presence, and whenever she came into a room, it was like a spotlight came out the ceiling and shined down on her. Even if you weren't looking at my mom, you knew where she was. In 1979, my mother had my older sister Kadeisha, but before she was even born, Kadeisha's father was shot and killed by the police. A year later, my momma met my dad, Samuel Corbin. About fifteen years older and married with a whole other family in another part of Watts, my dad had a good job at the Department of Water and Power, but he knew the other side as well. He was part of an old-school safecracking crew, and his older sons controlled the drug game in Watts's Front Street neighborhood. On the undeniable force of her personality alone, I'm sure my mother charmed him from the beginning, because soon after they met, on November 21, 1980, they had me. Because my dad had another family, there are no pictures of all three of us together in the hospital, no blue balloons tied to the mailbox when they brought me home. As soon as she could, my mother took me back to the dope house where she was living and got back to it. Life resumed. Growing up in that house, I had no set rules--no scheduled nap times or square meals, no one to wipe my ass or tell me to brush my teeth. Life was a random accumulation of events. Even now, I see it more in imagery and scenes than stories. I see myself dropping firecrackers through mail slots with my uncle. I see another of my uncles jumping out of a car and running from the police as we played trash can basketball in the project streets. And I see the police raid that sent my mom to jail. These were the days of L.A. police chief Daryl Gates and "Operation Hammer," when hundreds of SWAT team cops would brutally raid suspected drug houses in South Central. During one raid, on Dalton Avenue in 1988, the cops f***ed up the houses so bad, spray-painting "LAPD Rules" on walls and smashing furniture with sledgehammers and axes, that the Red Cross was called in. On another, after everyone was handcuffed, Gates brought Nancy Reagan through for a tour. Posing for the photo op, the First Lady commented, "These people in here are beyond the point of teaching and rehabilitating." When our house was raided, we weren't lucky enough to get a celebrity appearance. Maybe it was too early in the day. I remember getting ready to go to school when the SWAT police came charging in with sledgehammers and guns, looking more like RoboCops than beat cops. I remember the sound of everything breaking: the door, the table, the walls. Smash. Smash. Smash. It was scary as hell. Because of the raid, my momma went to jail, so she left me, Kadeisha, and my two younger brothers, Kevin and Bam, with my Granny Louella. Even after she got out, my mother knew the demons of her drug addiction were too much and that the best care we could get was with Granny. Still, she tried to help in her own way, leaving money she made from selling drugs with Miss Margaret at the candy store for my Pa Pa to pick up and turning her county check over to my grandparents. This is where my actual memories begin. Granny's house at 10617 Juniper Street in Watts was always buzzing. Part of that may have had to do with the fact that she didn't own a key, so the door was always open. You never knew who was going to be on the couch in the morning, recovering from last night or kicking things off today. But it was mainly about the food. In our neighborhood, my Granny was a legendary cook. Everything about the way she kept her house was designed to feed the masses, whether she knew you or not. In her backyard, she had live chickens and an occasional pig, which she and my Pa Pa would butcher themselves and roast in a pit in the front yard. She had citrus trees and a vegetable garden and grapevines. Granny had come out to California from Alabama as a child in the 1940s, during the Second Great Migration, and a piece of that southern country upbringing had stayed with her. In her younger days, she fed everyone from her yard. Only the staples were store-bought. You wanted ice cream? Go churn it yourself. She kept two deep freezers and two refrigerators in her garage, plus another refrigerator in the house, and she would pack all of them. When she cooked, she didn't do it just for the family; she cooked with the intention of feeding the whole block. She'd get up at five a.m. on the weekdays to make bacon and eggs and grits for all of us kids. People used to say they knew we were coming from Louella's because they'd see us happily eating bacon sandwiches on our walk to school, our faces shiny with grease. On the weekends, she'd cook the big meals, getting up early to put on one of her floral muumuus and get started. I remember watching her stand over a big old sink of water with her greens, meticulously cleaning each leaf like you might clean clothes on a washboard. In all the times I ate them, never once did I taste grit. She did the same thing with her chitlins, cleaning the intestines one at a time, incorporating love and care from the beginning, never skipping steps. She would make giant pots of gumbo, huge vats of bubbling chili and rice; pull every last bit of meat off the neckbones for beef and potato burritos. She was like the food Pied Piper. Folks from all over would smell my Granny's cooking and conveniently wander by right when it was ready, so every night was like a party. My Pa Pa and his friends would sit out on the porch drinking Thunderbird and Night Train, listening to music and laughing and joking and telling stories from the sixties as they shoveled down my Granny's meals. We'd have neighborhood kids and cousins and our brothers and sisters running through, grabbing a quick bite of a burrito, before sprinting into the backyard to play tag. And my Granny, tired from hours of cooking, would go sit in her favorite chair in the corner of the living room. On the table in front of her would always be five things: a cup of coffee; a Pall Mall Red cigarette; a lottery ticket; a cake; and a twelve-inch turn-the-dial television with a clothes hanger as an antenna, so she could watch her Murder, She Wrote or her Westerns. She loved John Wayne. Every day, there would be a different big-ass cake on that table: German chocolate, vanilla, pineapple upside-down, Sock It to Me. Anytime someone new came to the house, the first thing my Granny would ask them was "When is your birthday?" and then "What's your favorite type of cake?" It didn't matter if that kid never showed up again in his life, on his birthday, my Granny would have his favorite type of cake waiting on that table, ready for him, or anyone else, to take a slice. Excerpted from California Soul: An American Epic of Cooking and Survival by Keith Corbin, Kevin Alexander All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.