We couldn’t eat with friends or share food with others,” Ratanavanich says. “With the 2020 shutdown, we realized that a lot of how people came together was halted. Heidi Ratanavanich, Rachelle Faroul, and Jeremiah Jordan, owners of Golden Dragon in West Philly. You won’t find takeout dishes like sesame chicken or beef and broccoli, but rather kimchi, egg, and cheese sandwiches cucumber salads and fish cakes doused in curry. Ratanavanich’s family is Thai American, while Faroul’s family is from Barbados. It is a Black and Asian-operated food project started by Chellie Faroul, Jeremiah Jordan, and Heidi Ratanavanich with the mission to bring affordable and thoughtfully sourced dishes conceived from passed-down family recipes to the community of West Philadelphia. I say all this with love: I love these places and grew up in one.īut while Golden Dragon may look like a traditional Chinese takeout spot on the outside, it’s more than a little different. It feels like a place run by a Chinese American family working hard to get by and keep its customers loyal, where every dollar counts, competition is fierce, and the margins are razor-thin.
At first glance, Golden Dragon in West Philly looks like any other Chinese takeout joint, and I feel like we know it already: It seems like the kind of place that is open every day of the year sans Thanksgiving, cooking up crowd-pleasing sesame chicken that gets loaded into plastic bags with more than enough plastic silverware in classic-silhouette white-and-red takeout boxes, stuffed with fortune cookies that make you ponder your luck for the rest of the day.
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