LOS ANGELES — Keith Corbin wasn't looking for a career as a chef when he went to work for Roy Choi and Daniel Patterson at their Watts neighborhood restaurant, Locol.
"I was just coming home from prison. I had been fired from my other job. It was about paying bills," he says as he prepares to make a dish inside the Times Test Kitchen from Alta Adams, the acclaimed L.A. restaurant he opened in 2018 with Patterson.
It was at Locol, however, that he went from cook to kitchen manager, then chef in the Bay Area, and started to see new possibilities.
