At Black Dragon, the fortune cookies offer wisdom from Black proverbs — and Black TikTok
Tucked inside these crescent shaped sweets are phrases that speak to Black people and those who love them.
Kurt Evans’ style of American Chinese food is a culinary nod to Philadelphia’s Black culture in name and flavor.
At Black Dragon, Evans’ West Philadelphia Chinese takeout spot, salmon cheesesteak egg rolls — popular in the city’s Black Islamic community — are top sellers. Also on the menu is jerk chicken Rangoon and collard greens fried rice, a nod to West Indian and African American palates.
General Roscoe’s chicken, a play on the sweet-and-sour dish General Tso’s chicken, swimming in barbecue sauce, is named after General Roscoe Robinson, America’s first Black four-star Army general.
Evans brings this same unapologetically Black energy to Black Dragon’s custom fortune cookies. Not only are the crispy after-dinner treats flavored with cinnamon, sugar, and honey to taste like graham crackers — a delectable shoutout to Big Mama’s apple or lemon meringue pie crusts — slivers of papers tucked inside the crescent-shaped sweets are printed with classic quips straight from the mouths of Black folks.
I was born at night, but not last night.
If ya friends jump off a bridge, you gonna do it too?
And the best one of all:
If you like it, I love it.
“I wanted to bring nostalgia to growing up and I wanted to preserve the legacy of Black culture in slang, jargon … in how we talk,” Evans said.
Evans calls his fortunes proverbs. Because, he says, nestled in the short colloquial phrases are truths and advice based on experience and common sense. He’s amassed 45 proverbs that speak to Black people — and those who love them — of all generations.
Most are old-school: A hard head makes a soft behind. Some are parental admonishments: Do you have McDonald’s money? and I hope you know those songs like you know your homework.
Others originated with the TikTok set: Where they do that at?
It’s only a matter of time before They not like us tumbles out of a split cookie.
“I wanted people to laugh. I wanted people to relate,” Evans said. ”I wanted people to automatically know where we were coming from.“
He hopes to collect 100 proverbs, often asking customers to submit possibilities on Instagram. He sends his picks to a fortune cookie company that prints the proverbs, bakes the cookies, and seals them in a plastic wrapper. A box of 1,100 cookies arrives from his supplier each week — he won’t reveal who it is for proprietary reasons, except to say it’s an American company. He always runs out.
Wallito Samuel has been ordering food from Black Dragon since it opened last August. His most memorable proverb:
“I got a trick for yo a—,” Samuel said. “That’s what Black mothers might say to you when you are in trouble as a kid; and she’s not moonlighting as a magician.”
Yoked in culture
Proverbs are yoked in the culture of African and Asian peoples, part of an oral tradition of storytelling believed to connect the living to their ancestors.
They help us understand the divine in succinct ways, conveying ideas around life, death, morality, protection, and ritual, explained Anyabwile Love, a Black studies professor at Community College of Philadelphia.
One of the few things to survive the Middle Passage were African proverbs, Love said. During enslavement, proverbs informed enslaved Africans about their past and kept those stories alive when it was against the law for them to learn to read.
“They also served as beacons of hope,” Love said. “That better times would be coming.”
Language changes over time with pop culture, technology, and experience. Today’s proverbs are more like colloquialisms. They have, however, remained a coded language specific to Black families, communities, and different regions, and wherever we are, we understand them.
For example, “You are overcooking my grits,” a line from the 2000 movie Remember the Titans, set in Virginia and starring Denzel Washington, has Southern roots, and when a person says it, they are accusing another of usurping their authority. “Scared money don’t make none” — a line from “Midnight,” a 1993 song from A Tribe Called Quest — is shorthand for “You have to spend money to make money.” It is decidedly Northeast.
“They are time stamps,” Love said. “Thirty years from now, if I’m 80 years old, and I read a fortune that says ‘C.R.E.A.M.’ — cash rules everything around me — I’ll remember exactly where I was, what I was doing, and what that saying meant to me.”
For Evans, it’s all about documenting language as it unfolds.
“I wanted to preserve those sayings and phrases we grew up hearing,” Evans said. “They are so very important to the landscape of our communities.”
Black Dragon is located at 5260 Rodman St., www.blackdragontakeout.com. Open every day from noon to 9 p.m.