California Soul (paperback)

One way or another, Chef Keith Corbin has been cooking almost his entire life. Born in Watts in 1980, he grew up in the Jordan Downs Projects, home turf of the notorious Grape Street Watts Crips. At age thirteen, during the peak of America’s lurid fascination with LA gang culture, Corbin learned to cook crack, becoming so skilled that he’d be flown across the country to cook for drug operations in other cities. Once his criminal enterprises caught up with him, Corbin spent ten years in some of California’s most notorious maximum security prisons. Witnessing the resourcefulness of other inmates making kimchi out of leftover vegetables, and tamales from ground up Fritos, he developed his own culinary palate and ingenuity, creating “spreads” out of the normally unbearable commissary diet, and experimenting during his shifts in the prison kitchen. After release, Corbin was hired as a kitchen manager at Locol, an ambitious, heavily hyped restaurant by celebrity chefs Roy Choi and Daniel Pat