Enter Black Dragon
Chef Kurt Evans seeks to reinvigorate shuttered Chinese takeout restaurants across Philadelphia with a new concept: Black American Chinese food.
Philadelphia, like most cities across America, is a melting pot of cultures, but in West Philadelphia, Chinese takeout restaurants long beloved by the local community have steadily disappeared: enter, Black Dragon Takeout.
Through his new culinary venture, Chef Kurt Evans has a plan to resuscitate abandoned Chinese takeout spots across Philadelphia, re-envision American cuisine, and invest in his local community. The pop-up, soon to be brick-and-mortar, started to develop when Evans’ friend and mentor Earl Boyd, from the West Philadelphia Financial Institute (now VestedIn), told him that the organization owned several closed Chinese stores in West Philly and was looking for businesses to take them over. “We have this street called Lancaster Avenue,” says Evans, “where a lot of these Chinese stores have closed. There are second and third generation kids who don’t want to take on their parents' business,” but “for some Black Americans, their first experience with cultural cuisine is Chinese food. That is the lineage of those stores.”
The concept grew out of Evans’ own experiences. His career in the restaurant industry hit a turning point while working at Robert and Benjamin Bynum’s South Jazz Kitchen. “I hadn't seen anyone that looked like me at that level,” says Evans. “[They] had several concepts, and I had never seen a Black restaurateur before.” After working at South Jazz Kitchen, and then at Booker's as executive chef, Evans became the culinary director at Drive Change, a New York-based non-profit creating employment opportunities in the hospitality industry for formerly incarcerated young people. His time there changed his perspective on the “social responsibilities” and “responsibilities of employment” he had as “a chef and person,” and led him to start a dinner series called End Mass Incarceration (EMI), where he uses food to engage attendees in conversation and to inspire policy and organizational changes regarding mass incarceration in America. Although it may have taken some time, Evans believes “chefs have realized they have some skin in the game when it comes to our cities and communities, and they have more power than they actually think.”
Black Dragon Takeout is a new project for Evans, but it builds on his culinary interests and past efforts to better his community in both big ways and small. “You could just demolish these stores, and never even remember they were there,” says Evans, but “I want to take them over and bring the culture of the people who live there” now into the picture. He sees the project as an opportunity to “draw a connection through cuisine.” The idea has evolved and been deeply influenced by conversations with Chinese American chefs, like Tim Ma of Lucky Danger, as Evans tries to insightfully toe the line between the two cultures he seeks to marry. “It’s exciting!” says Evans, “talking about culture and the authority of food” with other chefs. Black Dragon Takeout is rooted in a sense of deliberate reclamation, reflecting the history, the culture, and the conditions of these Chinese takeout restaurants in West Philadelphia and their significance to the local community.
Through the food, Evans mimics the sense of dual identity these restaurants have taken on in West Philly. He sees it as “Black American food through the lens and aesthetics of Chinese American food,” with dishes like collard green egg rolls and oxtail rangoons. But some of the dishes push further into what Evans is trying, ideologically, to accomplish. His Moon Pie, for example, draws on the aesthetics of a traditional moon cake, but is constructed with the flavors and ingredients of The Nation of Islam’s navy bean pie. Evans’ take on General Tso’s Chicken, what he calls General Roscoe’s Chicken, does something similar, taking its name from the first Black four-star general in America and featuring a St. Louis-style barbecue sauce as an ode to the general’s hometown. The research and experimentation, which Evans does by reading Chinese cookbooks, collecting menus from local Chinese restaurants, and then looking for ways to connect what he finds to his own culture, has even led him to rediscover old and distinctly American dishes that were long ago born out of the meeting of Black and Chinese culinary traditions. “Yakamein,” says Evans, is “pretty much like a gumbo, but also like a ramen. It has an egg, broth, and noodles. It was a dish invented by Chinese immigrants building railroads in Louisiana.”
Braised Oxtail Rangoons, Charred Sweet Potato, Cream Cheese, Oxtail Gravy
Moon Pie: Coconut Cake with Navy Bean Custard
Now, Evans plans to repurpose and transform these abandoned storefronts. Traditionally, these restaurants have had “a stigma that they are not from the community and are not putting money back into it either,” says Evans. He wants to redefine what these restaurants can do for their surrounding residents. He is going to continue to hire formerly incarcerated people, but he also wants “the people who live in the neighborhood to work in the neighborhood, so, hiring from the community is gonna be important” once Black Dragon Takeout opens up a brick-and-mortar. The project is also about connecting with the neighborhood, and Evans hopes to “build the social equity piece of the business as we go.” Evans is still early in the process. He has found a few potential investors, identified a few potential properties, and still expects to hold Black Dragon pop-ups and EMI dinners in the spring, but admits there is “difficulty in finding the right partner that sees the vision.”
Evans ultimately wants Black Dragon Takeout to be scalable. And although there are future plans for packaged goods and merchandise, he really imagines Black Dragon as a local franchise. “I want us to be able to have our own facilities,” says Evans, and give “non-profit community organizations and formerly incarcerated people ownership and franchising opportunities.” It is a multi-pronged mission, but that doesn’t intimidate Evans. These vacated Chinese takeout spots have left a vacuum across Philadelphia and beyond by no longer providing hot, quality, and affordable meals to residents. Evans intends to fill those forgotten spaces with restaurants that reflect the past, embrace the present, and build strong foundations for the future.
