Black-Owned Restaurants | Dulan’s Soul Food Kitchen
Greg Dulan entered the restaurant business as a child, watching his father Adolf Dulan run the very first iteration of Dulan’s Soul Food Kitchen. Greg’s father Adolf and his family purchased an existing restaurant franchise and transitioned the business into Hamburger City, which became so popular that it gained a celebrity following, allowing them to open five Hamburger City restaurants by 1982.
After Adolf Dulan visited New York in 1999, he noticed a string of cafe-style restaurants and returned to Los Angeles with a mission. Dulan’s Soul Food Kitchen was born that very same year. Today, the Dulan’s family empire is co-run by Adolf’s son, Greg Dulan, who continues to carry on his family’s legacy.
We sat down with Greg to dive a little deeper into the behind-the-scenes of Dulan’s, the community he serves, and how the Black Lives Matter movement has changed his experience in the restaurant business.
Tell us about how your restaurant got started.
I can’t tell you how my restaurant got started without speaking about my family. I am a second-generation restaurateur. My parents purchased an existing Orange Julius Franchise on Martin Luther King Jr Blvd. in the mid-70’s, where I started working as a child. My father being the creative entrepreneur that he was quickly realized that the menu that Orange Julius was offering to the newly transformed black community was no longer appealing to his customer base. He stopped selling hot dogs, started selling chili cheese egg burgers, pastrami burgers, sweet potato pie, and changed the name to Hamburger City. To make his burgers unique, he added a special hot relish to the burgers, and he began to sell the Hamburger City Special, which was a burger and fries for a dollar. The one location grew to four, and as I continued to work in the family business, I discovered that despite the day to day challenges, I loved the restaurant business! I knew at an early age that I wanted to own my own business (not necessarily a restaurant) one day. After leaving Howard University in Washington DC with a business degree, I returned home to Los Angeles and opened a catering business, which eventually led to me opening Dulan’s on Crenshaw Soul Food Restaurant. I currently own three locations.
What is your signature dish and what does it mean to you?
Fried chicken is our number one seller and is a Soul Food menu mainstay. No Soul Food menu would be complete without fried chicken. It doesn’t matter how old you are or whether you are Black or White, or rich or poor; fried chicken is an American staple. My dad made fried chicken for us at home all the time. He would put his flour and seasoning in a brown paper grocery bag and add the chicken and roll down the top. He would then let us shake the bag giving the chicken a good coating. Then he gently laid the chicken in the hot oil simmering in my grandmother’s cast-iron skillet, and we would wait for the magic to happen. Sometimes he would use the remaining oil after frying the chicken to make a homemade gravy that we would spoon over rice to eat with scrambled eggs and biscuits with the fried chicken for breakfast. Mercy! My dad has been gone for a couple of years now, but I can still see him frying chicken like it was yesterday.
Tell us what the Black Lives Matter movement means to you and your business.
Well, the Black Lives Matter Movement is mainly about police brutality and American Citizen Equality for all. However, there is a narrative that I am finally hearing discussed in conjunction with the policing issue; and that is the plight of Black-Owned businesses in America. More importantly, people are actually talking about Black-Owned Restaurants, which has never happened before. I watched my dad struggle to open businesses without the ability to get a bank loan or any other means of financing. Banks did not make loans in “High Risk” areas. Thus, to start his businesses, my dad had to wipe out his small pension savings; but he was determined. There are many thousands of people who dream of opening a business but are unable to do so due to the inability to obtain financing or raise capital. The Black Lives Matter Movement is causing people to take a look at the struggles that Black-Owned businesses have had to operate under. The very fact that you are reaching out to me is an example of how the movement can benefit my business. The movement is shining a spotlight on Black-Owned restaurants. Many people are discovering that we exist for the first time, even though we have been here for nearly 40-years.
Besides ordering, what’s another example of how your community has shown support for your restaurant?
There are several examples I can site here. Dulan’s on Crenshaw Soul Food Restaurant has been an integral part of the Crenshaw Community for nearly 35-years. We are now feeding our third generation. Last year when former Vice President Joe Biden was looking for a place to have breakfast with local black ministers in Los Angeles, the ministers insisted on having breakfast at Dulan’s, and Mr. Biden came and stayed for more than two hours. This has occurred several times in the past and has always been a result of the community putting us forward. Because of community support and recommendations, we have been visited by Senator Arlen Specter, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Congressman Joe Kennedy, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the last three or four Mayors of Los Angeles. The community recommended us to serve a lite lunch for a local church visit by President George Bush, and early in my career, I was put forth by the community to serve lunch to Prince Charles from England when he visited a local High School. Today, as we deal with the pandemic, the community asked the Mayor’s office to hire Dulan’s on Crenshaw to serve the senior citizen meals for the Mayor’s citywide senior meal program. We have always given back to the community, and the community has always supported us.
What do you want to say to other Black restaurant owners?
I would tell them not to be afraid to reach out to others for advice. Try to find a mentor who knows business in general or the restaurant business and who can give you guidance from time to time. Get out and travel and see what others are doing as you will find inspiration in doing so. Make sure you are acquainted with the lenders and bankers within your neighborhood — build relationships with them and community members. Never stop your food business education because, as you educate yourself, you will undoubtedly find your way to more capital resources. Don’t be afraid to completely change your business model if things aren’t working. Get involved in your local community and always give back in the name of your business (“growth through giving”). Monitor your costs closely on a daily and weekly basis. Be supportive of other restaurants because you can’t feed everybody, and neither can they. Put your family and personal relationships first.
Recently, we launched the Black-Owned Restaurants collection in over 130 cities and counting. Every order from this collection will have no delivery fee. Find these restaurants by searching “Black-Owned” in the Postmates app.
In addition, we’re working to add more Black-owned restaurants to our list. If you know a business in your area that you’d like to support, let us know at Black-owned@postmates.com.
We stand with the Black Lives Matter movement, our restaurant partners, our Postmates Fleet, and each of you across the country, but will continually ask ourselves what we can do to help, and build on our actions.
