Black Dragon Takeout Turns Two, and Kurt Evans Keeps Going

Kurt Evans wrote back in four words. Thank you. That was the whole reply to the note I sent him for Black Dragon’s second anniversary, and it told me everything about how these two years actually went, because Kurt has never needed more than a few honest words to say something true. I have known him long enough to remember him before any of it, before the red and gold dragon painted across the brick at 5260 Rodman Street, before the takeout bags printed with BLACK AMERICAN CHINESE FOOD, before people started lining up outside a storefront in West Philadelphia that used to belong to somebody else’s Chinese restaurant. Kurt worked with us years ago, and I have believed one thing since then. When good people leave your orbit to build something of their own, you do not wave them off at the door. You keep showing up. Not while they are still around you. Afterward. For years, because their success is worth celebrating.

Two Years on Rodman Street

Black Dragon Takeout opened its doors on August 29, 2024, inside a storefront at 5260 Rodman Street that used to be a Chinese restaurant. The address sits inside Kingsessing, the stretch of West Philadelphia that starts at 53rd Street, just off the corner of 53rd and Cedar Avenue, per West Philly Local’s account of opening day. People were already lining up before the doors opened that Thursday, and the crowd was heavy enough that Kurt closed the following day just to restock, then reopened Saturday at noon to a line that had not gotten any shorter. Two years later the hours are steadier and the menu has settled, and the restaurant’s own site still describes exactly what Kurt set out to build: soul food carrying the aesthetics of classic Chinese American takeout, in a neighborhood that had been losing that aesthetic one closed storefront at a time.

The Corner Chinese Store He Never Forgot

The idea did not start with Black Dragon. It started in 2016, when a mentor named Earl Boyd pointed out to Kurt that the Chinese takeout counters along Lancaster Avenue, the ones with the bulletproof glass and the laminated menus, were closing one after another across the neighborhoods where Kurt grew up, a story Philadelphia magazine traced back to that conversation. Kurt is from Southwest Philadelphia, around 46th and Woodland, and those storefronts were part of his own childhood the way a corner store is part of anybody’s. He spent years working the idea into a plan long before there was a lease: pop-ups, fundraising dinners, and a rule he has held onto through every version of the concept, reported in detail by StarChefs. Black Dragon will only ever open inside a building that used to sell Chinese food. Not a vacant lot, not a former sneaker store, not wherever the rent happens to be cheapest that year. A former Chinese takeout, every time. That rule is the whole point.

From South Street to Down North to a Dragon of His Own

Before any of that, Kurt built a career that reads like a decade of practice for exactly this. He worked at South, the jazz supper club on Broad Street, under Robert and Benjamin Bynum, and later became executive sous chef at Booker’s. In the years before Down North Pizza existed, he started the End Mass Incarceration dinner series, ticketed meals that raised money for bail funds, expungement clinics, and organizations like Books Through Bars. He co-founded Everybody Eats Philly, a group of Black chefs getting food to people who needed it during the worst of the pandemic, and then co-founded Down North Pizza in Strawberry Mansion, a for-profit pizzeria that hires only formerly incarcerated Philadelphians, pays a real wage, and helps with housing and legal representation on top of it. The World’s 50 Best organization named him a Champion of Change for that work. Kurt later signed his ownership stake in Down North over to the people working there and moved on to the next thing. Black Dragon is what he built next, and it carries every one of those lessons inside it. Reuse what the neighborhood already has. Hire the people other employers will not. Build something that can outlast the person who started it.

The food is the argument, and it is a specific one. The menu runs through collard green egg rolls, oxtail lo mein, jerk chicken dumplings, and General Roscoe’s Chicken, named for Roscoe Robinson Jr., the first Black four star general in the history of the United States Army. There is a Moon Pie on the dessert menu that layers navy bean custard with coconut cake, which is either an unlikely pairing or exactly the kind of unlikely pairing Kurt has been building his whole career around. He does not call it fusion. In one interview he called it connection food instead: fusion implies two separate things smashed together for effect, and connection food implies two things that were always closer than anybody admitted. Even the name carries a memory. Black Dragon borrows its title from The Last Dragon, the 1985 martial arts film Kurt watched as a kid in West Philadelphia, long before he had any reason to think a restaurant could carry that name. Craig Laban reviewed the place for the Inquirer that winter and came away calling the oxtail superb, tender and unctuous meat scented with Jamaican pimento, and the Soul Roll, built from collards, mac and cheese, and barbecue chicken, tastes like an entire picnic inside a deep-fried tube. That is not a small compliment from a critic who does not hand them out for free.

Why Two Years Is Not Nothing

Two years does not sound like a milestone until you know what the first year of any restaurant is actually up against. An analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics figures and a twenty year UC Berkeley study of eighty one thousand restaurants puts the first year closure rate for new restaurants somewhere between fourteen and seventeen percent, nowhere near the ninety percent myth that traces back to a 2003 credit card commercial and still will not die. The real numbers past that first year are still not friendly, and the businesses most exposed to them are exactly the kind Kurt built: independent, funded early through pop-ups and dinners rather than an outside investor, tied to a single storefront, and carrying a mission that costs money before it earns any. Black Dragon’s own opening months told the same story in miniature. Reviews from that first winter describe waits that ran past two hours and a kitchen that sometimes ran out of food before the day was done, the kind of growing pains Laban’s review traces from a rocky summer into a steadier winter. That gap, between the restaurant Kurt opened and the restaurant Black Dragon became months later, is where most independent places quietly fail. Kurt’s did not.

Showing Up After They Leave Your Orbit

When I sat down to write Kurt for this anniversary, I did not have to reach for language. Entrepreneurship. Food. Culture. Community. Jobs. Those are the five things I told him he is building, in that order, because that is the order I actually see them in when I look at Black Dragon: a business first, then a kitchen, then a culture, then a neighborhood, then paychecks. Small. Local. Diverse. Equitable. Those four words did the rest of the work, because Kurt did not need me to explain what they meant. He has been living them since long before I knew him as anything more than somebody good at his job. What I keep coming back to is the wall inside Black Dragon that pairs Power to the People and Black Power posters with the words FOOD IS OUR COMMON GROUND printed straight across them, because that wall is not decoration. It is the whole argument, hung where every customer waiting on a bag of collard egg rolls has to look at it. Two years down. I already know what year three looks like from here: another storefront that used to sell something else, waiting for somebody to walk back in and remind it what it can still be.