Two Years of Black Dragon Takeout on Rodman Street

Two years ago, on August 29, 2024, a takeout window opened at 5260 Rodman Street, a few steps off 53rd and Cedar, and West Philadelphia started eating a little differently. That is the anniversary, and I want to mark it properly, because what Black Dragon Takeout is doing is easy to enjoy and easy to underrate at the same time.

The enjoyable part is obvious the first time you order. Collard green and cheesesteak egg rolls. Mac and cheese and jerk chicken dumplings. Oxtail lo mein. Sweet potato sour chicken. You read that list and you smile, and then the food arrives and it is not a joke, it is cooking.

The part people underrate is the thinking underneath it.

Kurt Evans did not open a restaurant, he reopened an institution

Chef Kurt Evans grew up in this neighborhood, and he had been carrying the idea for years before he ever signed a lease. The Philadelphia Inquirer put the number at close to nine years of turning it over before the doors opened.

Nine years is not indecision. Nine years is somebody who understood exactly what he was walking into.

Here is the observation the whole place is built on, and it is one I had never heard anybody say out loud until he said it. The corner Chinese takeout has been closing across Black neighborhoods in this city. Not all at once, not with a press release, just one shuttered window at a time. For decades those counters were open late, cheap, reliable, and often the only hot food you could get after nine at night on certain blocks. When one closes, the block does not just lose a menu. It loses a light that was on.

So his answer was not to mourn it. His answer was to take the form back over and fill it with something else. He describes Black Dragon as Black American food through the lens and aesthetics of Chinese American food, and I think that phrasing is precise rather than clever. The paper bag, the counter, the white box that folds shut at the top, the speed of the whole exchange: all of that is inherited on purpose, and none of it is an accident. What goes in the box is his.

The food is an argument, and it holds up

I want to be careful here, because a concept restaurant can coast on the concept and a lot of them do. This one does not.

Start with the yakamein, which is the dish that gives the whole idea its receipts. Yakamein is a noodle soup with roots in exactly the place Black Dragon lives, the long overlap between Chinese and Black cooking in American cities. It is not a fusion invented for a menu. It is old, it is real, and putting it on a Rodman Street counter is a history lesson served hot.

Then General Roscoe’s Chicken, which is General Tso’s built on barbecue sauce. Then the Moon Pie, a coconut cake with navy bean custard that nods to the Nation of Islam navy bean pie, a Philadelphia object if ever there was one. Then oxtail rangoons, which should not work and absolutely do.

Every one of those dishes is doing two things at once. It feeds you, and it says something. That is a very hard thing to pull off on one plate. It is a ridiculous thing to pull off across an entire menu, and I do not think enough people have said so out loud.

He hires the people other kitchens will not

This is the part I would put on the wall.

Black Dragon prioritizes local hiring, and it deliberately offers work to people coming out of incarceration and out of halfway programs. That is not a marketing line bolted onto a restaurant. It is the continuation of everything Evans was doing before he had a room of his own.

He built End Mass Incarceration, a dinner series that uses a meal to hold a conversation about incarceration policy in this country, and he served as culinary director at Drive Change, a nonprofit whose entire purpose is hospitality employment for formerly incarcerated people. So by the time he was hiring for his own counter, he had spent years learning what that actually requires from an employer, which is more than good intentions and a job posting.

I have said before that a restaurant is infrastructure. This is what I mean by it. A kitchen is one of the few workplaces in a city that can teach a trade, pay the same week, and take somebody the rest of the economy has decided not to take a chance on. Most owners will tell you the risk is too high. Some of them do the math honestly and some of them just repeat what they have heard. Evans did the math and hired.

A word about where he learned it

Small note, and it matters to me personally. Before Black Dragon, Evans cooked at South Jazz Kitchen under Robert and Benjamin Bynum, and later ran the kitchen at Booker’s. If you have spent any time in Philadelphia hospitality you know what that lineage means. The Bynum rooms have been training grounds for this city’s cooking for a long time, and the people who came through them tend to leave with more than technique. They leave understanding that a room belongs to a neighborhood.

You can see that in how Black Dragon behaves. It sits on a residential corner. It is a takeout window, not a destination with a velvet rope. The price points are neighborhood price points. Nothing about it is asking West Philadelphia to dress up for it.

Two years is the part nobody claps for

Openings get coverage. Anniversaries get a post like this one and not much else, which is backwards, because the second year is where restaurants actually die.

The first year runs on adrenaline, press and curiosity. Philadelphia Magazine and Metro Philadelphia were there for the opening, and the story travelled a long way past this city: China Daily has covered it twice this year, which is not a sentence I expected to write about a takeout counter at 53rd and Cedar.

Year two runs on repeat customers, food cost, staffing and whether the thing still tastes right on a slow Tuesday in February. That is the test, and Black Dragon passed it.

So today, chopsticks up to Chef Kurt, to Pierre Sims and everybody working that line, and to two years of doing it their own way on their own corner.

Philadelphia is better, and considerably more delicious, because the Dragon is in it.

Here is to year three.

Kurt Evans did not open a restaurant, he reopened an institution

The food is an argument, and it holds up

He hires the people other kitchens will not

A word about where he learned it

Two years is the part nobody claps for

Sources and references