Every Friday night time of his childhood, Kurt Evans and his mom would order cartons of Chinese takeout, the cardboard containers crammed to the brim with classics like shrimp lo mein, egg foo younger, General Tso’s rooster and beef and broccoli.
After every meal the Philadelphia native, now in his late 30s, would crack open a fortune cookie, studying the tiny paper with its phrases of knowledge on one facet and a string of fortunate numbers on the different.
“You know, the lottery is very important in Black culture,” says Evans, recalling his earliest introduction to Chinese meals.
Today, he’s on the different facet of the counter as the chef-owner of Black Dragon, a Chinese takeout on Rodman Street in Philadelphia’s Southwest.
Behind its black-painted façade, with a daring crimson and gold emblem impressed by the cult 1985 film “The Last Dragon,” nothing inside is kind of because it appears.
The egg rolls are full of collard greens, the lo mein topped with gumbo and a candy and spicy rooster dish is known as General Roscoe’s Chicken, after Roscoe Robinson Jr., the US Army’s first Black four-star common.
“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, incomes him the Champion of Change award from the World’s 50 Best Restaurants in 2021.
This dedication extends to the messages inside his fortune cookies, many of which he writes himself.
Like many US metropolis neighborhoods, Evans’ neighborhood as soon as teemed with unbiased Chinese takeouts. But over the many years, they started to shutter their doorways as the youthful generations in the family-owned retailers moved on.
In 2024, he took over one of these empty storefronts and opened his takeout restaurant, serving American Chinese meals seasoned with the flavors of his roots.
Among Black Dragon’s most-beloved dialog starters are the fortune cookies, that are stuffed with the wit and knowledge of the Black neighborhood.
“I wanted to be culturally relevant with the food and the people I was serving,” says Evans.
The chef wrote round 40 sayings and gathered extra from his Instagram followers.
His favourite? A line handed down from his mom: “I brought you into this world, and I could take you out.”
“My mom said that a lot,” he laughs. “Everyone I know grew up hearing some version of that.”
Black Dragon’s fortune cookies rejoice a fusion of communities, however the crunchy treats carry extra historical past than most diners understand. They didn’t come from China, and sure not even from Chinese American eating places.
Most analysis factors to Japan, in accordance to Yasuko Nakamachi. The Japanese creator has been fascinated with fortune cookies since 1990, when she was a pupil touring in New York, and cracked one open after a meal in an area Chinese joint.
The message described her completely: “You are someone who finds beauty in small things that others do not notice.”
It was a reminiscence she returned to after stumbling on a ebook on the historical past of Japanese sweets, through which she noticed one thing acquainted: New Year’s sweets produced from rice dough with written fortunes. Known as tsujiura gashi, or fortune-telling confections, these got here from Kanazawa, a metropolis in Japan’s Ishikawa prefecture.
She additionally discovered an illustration from Japan’s Edo interval, between 1603 and 1868, displaying a vendor making folded senbei — virtually an identical to trendy fortune cookies.
The discoveries confirmed her suspicion: Japan has been making fortune cookies for a whole lot of years.
Various types of fortune-telling snacks nonetheless exist in Japan right now. Centuries in the past, nevertheless, they had been probably reserved for the higher class — primarily as a result of few may learn — in locations like geisha homes or on bustling streets in main 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 printed her findings in a ebook, “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, very like right now, supplied light-hearted leisure, giving prospects an opportunity to socialize and share interpretations.
So how did the humble fortune cookie make its manner throughout the Pacific and into Chinese takeaways in the US? Historians haven’t been ready to come to a consensus.
Some companies declare to have launched them, together with the Japanese bakery Fugetsu-do and the Hong Kong Noodle Company in Los Angeles.
Most consultants, together with Nakamachi, credit score the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco. There, fortune cookies had been finally mass-produced by Benkyodo, a now-defunct sweets producer.
Gary Ono, a descendant of Benkyodo’s proprietor, shared an iron cookie mildew with Nakamachi, noting that his grandfather had constructed the first machine to make fortune cookies in the US.
Today, Nakamachi’s 20 years of analysis means that the cookies most of us are acquainted with right now had been virtually definitely impressed by these Japanese originals.
By the early twentieth century, fortune cookies had turn into standard throughout the US and Canada, showing in American Chinese and Japanese eating places, together with basic chop suey homes operated by each American Chinese and American Japanese proprietors.
Production at Japanese-run factories halted throughout World War II when many Japanese Americans had been compelled into internment camps. Chinese-owned factories crammed the hole, popularizing fortune cookies in the following many years.
But conventional fortune cookie makers are disappearing. New York’s Wonton Food Company is now the largest producer. The Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory, based in 1962, is San Francisco’s solely manufacturing facility. Montreal’s Wing Noodles, Canada’s oldest, closed in 2025 after eight many years.
The Oakland Fortune Factory, in the meantime, has managed to revive curiosity in the treats. Founded in 1957, it’s the oldest surviving cookie manufacturing facility in the Bay Area.
In 2016, Jiamin Wong, a first-generation Chinese immigrant, walked previous the manufacturing facility, which had modified little since the Fifties, noticed it was on the market and purchased it.
Jiamin’s daughter Alicia and her husband, Alex Issvoran, took over in 2018 and launched some updates.
Much of the manufacturing line stays the similar right now — freshly baked cookies emerge from six monster machines, simply as they did in the Fifties, and are hand-folded into their acquainted crescent shapes whereas nonetheless scorching and delicate.
The conventional plastic-wrapped variations are, nevertheless, lengthy gone.
“We have a seasonal catalog of cookies with different designs,” Issvoran tells NCS. “Each new design has to have a really strong meaning behind it. They are dipped in chocolate and are made with the highest quality ingredients we can find.”
Gaining repute by means of word-of-mouth, the manufacturing facility now attracts customized orders from Silicon Valley firms. The proprietor says the writers of the Adult Swim cartoon “Rick and Morty” even penned messages for a limited-edition cookie.
In 2020, throughout Black Lives Matter protests, Issvoran and Wong created “solidarity cookies,” with quotes from activists and civil rights leaders. Part of the proceeds went to charities supporting equality and justice. In 2022, they launched a sequence for the Stop Asian Hate marketing campaign.
“Oakland has a deep history of civil rights,” Issvoran says. The protests impressed the pair to do one thing to assist their neighborhood.
“After the cookies got here out, I obtained a couple of calls from prospects we didn’t know. They mentioned they cried once they opened the cookies and we realized we had been doing one thing extremely significant.
“Sometimes we get to be a part of moments like these.”
Issvoran says he’s discovered that fortune cookies generally is a instrument to rejoice cultures whereas bringing folks collectively.
“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 advanced into an unlikely cultural icon in a international land is inspiring.
“I feel that American fortune cookies have taken on a form quite different from their Japanese counterparts,” she says.
“In Japan, tsuji-ura 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.”
Across continents and generations, the fortune cookie has bridged cultures — a token of thanks and enjoyable at a restaurant, or as a service of vital political and cultural messages.
Its adaptability has made it a timeless and mild instrument to invite reflection and sharing.
“People always look forward to the little message in the fortune cookies. There is a lady who comes in and she is always like, ‘Make sure my cookies are in the bag,’” says Black Dragon’s Evans.
“For me, fortune cookies are a great way to preserve culture. They lead to a lot of conversations.”
The chef hopes that when folks open their fortune cookies with their family and friends, they are going to share what’s written and move on the information, identical to he and his mom used to, each Friday night time.