A Philadelphia chef opens a takeout restaurant that blends American Chinese food with flavors of his Black heritage, offering a unique dining experience that celebrates cultural fusion and community. Inspired by the closing of a fortune cookie manufacturer and the disappearance of Chinese takeout restaurants in the U.S. neighborhoods, the restaurant serves dishes like collard green egg rolls and General Roscoe's Chicken.
Fortune cookie manufacturer Wing’s Chinese Noodles in Montreal, Canada, closed its doors at the end of 2025. Every Friday night of his childhood, Kurt Evans and his mother would order cartons of Chinese takeout, the cardboard boxes filled to the brim with classics like shrimp lo mein, egg foo young, General Tso’s chicken and beef and broccoli.
After each meal the Philadelphia native, now in his late 30s, would crack open a fortune cookie, reading the tiny paper with its words of wisdom on one side and a string of lucky numbers on the other. “You know, the lottery is very important in Black culture,” says Evans, recalling his earliest introduction to Chinese food.Behind its black-painted façade, with a bold red and gold logo inspired by the cult 1985 movie “The Last Dragon,” nothing inside is quite as it seems. The egg rolls are stuffed with collard greens, the lo mein topped with gumbo and a sweet and spicy chicken dish is named General Roscoe’s Chicken, after Roscoe Robinson Jr., the US Army’s first Black four-star general. “Our tagline is Black American Chinese food. I do that on purpose — to start a conversation,” says Evans, who has been combining cooking with activism for years, earning him the Champion of Change award from the World’s 50 Best Restaurants in 2021.Like many US city neighborhoods, Evans’ community once teemed with independent Chinese takeouts. But over the decades, they began to shutter their doors as the younger generations in the family-owned shops moved on. In 2024, he took over one of those empty storefronts and opened his takeout restaurant, serving American Chinese food seasoned with the flavors of his roots. His favorite? A line passed down from his mother: “I brought you into this world, and I could take you out.”Black Dragon’s fortune cookies celebrate a fusion of communities, but the crunchy treats carry more history than most diners realize. They didn’t come from China, and likely not even from Chinese American restaurants. The message described her perfectly: “You are someone who finds beauty in small things that others do not notice.” It was a memory she returned to after stumbling on a book on the history of Japanese sweets, in which she saw something familiar: New Year’s sweets made from rice dough with written fortunes. Known asfortune-telling confections, these came from Kanazawa, a city in Japan’s Ishikawa prefecture. The discoveries confirmed her suspicion: Japan has been making fortune cookies for hundreds of years. Various forms of fortune-telling snacks still exist in Japan today. Centuries ago, however, they were likely reserved for the upper class — mainly because few could read — in places like geisha houses or on bustling streets in major cities from Tokyo to Kyoto. “In the past, they contained short phrases, proverbs, humorous lines, or even snippets of popular song lyrics of the Edo period,” says Nakamachi, who published her findings in a book, “Tsujiura no bunka-shi” — or “The Cultural History of Fortune Telling” — in 2015. “Sometimes, there were slightly flirtatious exchanges, reflecting the culture of the red-light district then.” These treats, much like today, offered light-hearted entertainment, giving customers a chance to socialize and share interpretations. So how did the humble fortune cookie make its way across the Pacific and into Chinese takeaways in the US? Historians haven’t been able to come to a consensus. Today, Nakamachi’s 20 years of research suggests that the cookies most of us are familiar with today were almost certainly inspired by these Japanese originals.By the early 20th century, fortune cookies had become popular across the US and Canada, appearing in American Chinese and Japanese restaurants, including classic chop suey houses operated by both American Chinese and American Japanese proprietors. But traditional fortune cookie makers are disappearing. New York’s Wonton Food Company is now the largest manufacturer. The Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory, founded in 1962, is San Francisco’s only factory. Montreal’s Wing Noodles, Canada’s oldest, The Oakland Fortune Factory, meanwhile, has managed to revive interest in the treats. Founded in 1957, it’s the oldest surviving cookie factory in the Bay Area. In 2016, Jiamin Wong, a first-generation Chinese immigrant, walked past the factory, which had changed little since the 1950s, saw it was for sale and bought it. Jiamin’s daughter Alicia and her husband, Alex Issvoran, took over in 2018 and introduced some updates. Gaining reputation through word-of-mouth, the factory now attracts custom orders from Silicon Valley companies. The owner says the writers of the Adult Swim cartoon “Rick and Morty” even penned messages for a limited-edition cookie. “Oakland has a deep history of civil rights,” Issvoran says. The protests inspired the pair to do something to help their community. “They’re familiar to everybody, yet it’s something we can make new again — a way to celebrate cultures respectfully while remaining relevant and fun.”For Nakamachi, seeing how fortune cookies evolved into an unlikely cultural icon in a foreign land is inspiring.senbei were also a kind of communication tool, shared with people around you for fun. But I think Americans have gone even further, embedding messages that actively influence and reach out to others. They have been used in ways that were not part of the Japanese imagination.”
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