Alta Adams

“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.”

Ah yes, the double fry method. Here’s a little secret: this is how fried chicken is prepared at most high end restaurants across the country. The morning before the restaurant opens the chicken is prepped and fried at a low temperature – about 200 degrees – in order to cook it all the way through. That evening when someone orders the fried chicken for dinner it’s flash fried again and served. The result isn’t bad, usually the chicken is crispy and hot, but for Chef Corbin it didn’t quite hit the right note.

“It was just too common,” he says. “We wanted to have our chicken differentiated from everybody else’s.”

He got together with co-founder, Michelin star winning chef Daniel Patterson, to try to figure out a technique for frying the chicken quickly that would also yield a dish that was delicious, and, most importantly, different than anything else in the Los Angeles culinary scene.

“We decided to just skip the double fry and just put it in the oven.”

Chef Corbin and Chef Patterson took the chicken which is brined for 24 hours in salt and buttermilk and applied a delicate mix of flour, water, and spices. But instead of frying, they put it in a special combination steam oven and baked it at a relatively low temperature for several hours. Afterwards they brought it out, cooled it down, and then fried it. Because the water, flour, and fat baked in the oven it formed a kind of glue-like paste that “crisped up like glass.” Once Corbin and Patterson bit into the chicken, that’s when they realized they had something special.

“The flavor was no longer on the surface of the skin, but had baked all the way through,” says Chef Corbin. “The fat from the chickens rose to the surface, and then went back down, carrying this flavor to the bone. We just said that’s it.”

For Alta Adams regulars like McKenzie Dodge, the fried chicken isn’t so much a good meal as it is an entry point into a larger culinary journey. A collection of golden and delicious poultry that is somehow greater than the sum of its parts.

Growing up in Pasadena, California, Dodge’s early experiences with fried chicken were the decidedly not-good-for-you saline and oil injected versions commonly sold in black and clear plastic tubs in supermarkets across the country. While fried chicken served this way can be satisfying, it can hardly be called transcendent.

On any given evening at Alta Adams you might catch a glimpse of some of Hollywood’s most accomplished Black artists, performers, and producers. Issa Rae, Tiffany Haddish, John Legend, and Jay-Z have all dined here. If you look closely at anyone — famous or not — you start to see the same expression, one that arrives not long after dishes like the fried chicken are served. Some aren’t aware of it. Others, like Dodge, are keenly tuned to when it happens.

“Whenever I have really delicious food, I will get really quiet and the biggest smile will creep over my face.”