Coolio: From Gangsta Rap to 'Ghetto Gourmet'

As his cookbook climbs up the bestseller list, rapper Coolio speaks to Rachel Syme about “Drunk-Ass Chicken,” “Soul Rolls,” and a salad that will “get those panties off.”

If you want an idea of how cool the 46-year-old rapper Coolio (nee Artis Leon Ivey, Jr.) is, look no further than this: He fell asleep during our first interview. While driving on the freeway.

“I’m sorry, I nodded off on you there, could you tell?” he mumbled over the phone, while driving through Los Angeles. “Man, I’m sorry, I had a rough night and I’m sleepy as hell. And I just bought car insurance today too, and I was falling asleep right there with the lady talking in my face. It was actually the funniest sh— in the world.”

“We were watching Food Network, commenting on how boring it was,” he says. “And I thought I could do a cooking show where I’d be clowning on everyone, with more profanity, and better looking girls, and a better house band.”

• View Our Gallery of Coolio's Favorite Dishes—and the RecipesCoolio prides himself on three things these days: Bluntness (“I can’t kiss ass anymore. I have simply lost my taste for sh—, if you know what I mean.”), his music career (his single "Gangsta’s Paradise" went quadruple platinum in 1996 and he has been working steadily since), and his cooking. It is the latter that has become the main focus of his late career, and the reason that he is dozing off at the wheel; Coolio has been working around the clock to promote his new cookbook, aptly titled Cookin’ With Coolio: 5 Star Meals at a 4 Star Price. The book, which hit shelves November 17, has already become the best seller in Amazon’s Soul Food category and continues to climb the gastronomy charts with the holidays approaching. Somehow, the ex-convict, ex-gang member, and Compton drug dealer has become a new beacon for intelligent African-American cuisine. Of course, he is doing it his own way.

Cookin’ With Coolio, the book, grew out of Cookin’ With Coolio, the show, a seven-minute online series that began airing on Web network My Damn Channel in March 2008. Produced on a shoestring budget by Coolio himself and his cousin/manager Jerez, the first episode, “Caprese Salad,” features the rapper in his kitchen (after he shows up an hour late to the taping), surrounded by two scantily clad women called the “Sauce Girls.” He is wearing a bedazzled jacket bearing the words “Ghetto Gourmet,” and guarantees that his caprese salad will “get them panties right off.”

Right away, it was clear that Coolio was not going to follow the traditional celebrity-chef model. As television critic Troy Patterson wrote when the show first aired, Coolio’s format was designed to offend, relying heavily on “inner-city minstrelsy.” For example, instead of pulling salt or pepper from bowls or mills, Coolio uses “dime bags” full of spices, the tiny Ziplocs used to transport cocaine or marijuana. He throws out fusion terms of his own design, including “Ghettitalian,” and “Blasian,” and knowing that every television chef must have his catchphrase, constantly uses the term “Shakazulu!” as his Lagasse “Bam!”—a punctuation mark for every action.

“I started out saying mothaf—ker as my phrase, but then my daughter told me I cuss too much. So it became Shakazulu,” he explains. There is little more amusing in the world than watching Coolio try to explain the phrase to Kathie Lee Gifford and Hoda Kotb on the Today show—but his status as kind of a circus act as well as a chef is all part of Coolio’s methodology.