A $26 Banana Split Anchors the New Alta Adams. I'd Start There.

Dinner entrees run $38 to $75 and the banana split is $26, per the listing published with Jenn Harris's Aug. 27, 2026 Los Angeles Times review. Here's what I'd order.

The most interesting number on the reopened Alta Adams menu is $26, and it buys a banana split. Dinner entrees at the West Adams restaurant run $38 to $75. That figure comes from the listing published with Jenn Harris's Aug. 27, 2026 review in the Los Angeles Times. The restaurant's own posted menu and its reopening announcement were not in the material this desk read. Every figure here is the Times listing's, checked August 2026. Dish-by-dish prices are not published in it.

My take: the closure is not the story. The revamp is. Chef Keith Corbin shut Alta Adams earlier in 2026 for three months. He cooked through Mexico and Europe, and competed on the Padma Lakshmi-hosted competition “America's Culinary Cup,” the Times reported. He reopened in May with a menu the Times critic reads as Angeleno rather than Southern.

That lands on anyone who knew the address as the neighborhood's fried-chicken-and-oxtails room. The fried chicken is gone, Harris wrote, replaced by a wood-grilled half chicken. The price bands make this a plan-your-evening proposition, not a drop-in one.

What changed, and what didn't

Corbin opened Alta Adams in 2018 with Daniel Patterson, billed then as California soul cooking, the Times reported. Patterson stepped away from the partnership in 2025. The two still run the Alta Community nonprofit together. Corbin's cooking career began two years after a prison release, with no formal training, per the same review. He started at Locol, the community-focused Watts restaurant Patterson ran with Roy Choi.

The through-line is a bean. Black-eyed peas were fritters at the old Alta Adams for years. On the new menu they are a salad with crisp shredded ham hock, chiles, cilantro and lime, per the Times.

“Black-eyed peas are important for me, because it's a dish that represents survival,” Corbin told the Times.

He cited the ingredient's history as a food of enslaved Africans and of the wartime South, the outlet reported.

What it costs

From the listing published with the Times review, checked August 2026:

• Raw and starters: $13 to $48
• Salad and vegetables: $22 to $36
• From the fire: $24 to $54
• Entrees: $38 to $75
• Desserts: $22 to $26

The address is 5359 West Adams Blvd. in Los Angeles. Dinner runs Tuesday through Sunday, 5 to 10 p.m., per that same listing. Valet and street parking are noted, and the bar is full with a short wine list. Apart from the $26 banana split named in the review text, individual dish prices are not published there.

What I'd order

At $22 to $36, the vegetables are where I'd spend first. I'd start with the black-eyed pea salad and the fire-roasted cabbage, both on Harris's recommended list. That list also names the suya-spiced bone marrow, the confit duck leg, the wood-grilled half chicken and the banana split. Six recommendations, and looking at that list I'd put my money on three of them.

The dessert is the one I'd argue for hardest. At $26, ice cream is either a joke or a course. The Times critic's closing line settles which:

“I don't know what Corbin was eating on his ice cream truck, but it must have been better than anything on mine.”

One caution from the same review: the drinks lean sweet. Bar director Madeline McQuillan oversees the program, drawing on spirits from Mexico, West Africa and Asia. Harris found the Peaches and Pea heavy-handed. If sugar before dinner isn't your evening, the short wine list is the move.

What this desk cannot tell you: no diner or social chatter about the reopening was in the material read here. No second outlet's review of the new menu was either. One critic, one listing, one set of prices.

Source: latimes.com, retrieved August 28, 2026.