“My granny always used a cast iron skillet. Because when you cook in a cast iron the chicken gets this dark ring around the bottom from sitting in the skillet for so long. I wanted to replicate that in the restaurant.”
Turns out homespun methods (while delicious!) don’t always scale for large amounts of people. Frying a large amount of chicken using just cast iron skillets is massively time consuming – something that can mean death for a new restaurant in LA’s hyper-competitive market.
“It was a total disaster,” Corbin recalls.
“They had to find a way to speed up that process,” says Asia Stewart-Howell, Alta Adams’ General Manager. “Outside of the traditional double fry method.”