The secret history of the fortune cookies you’ve been eating all your life
By Maggie Hiufu Wong, CNN
Every Friday night of his childhood, Kurt Evans and his mother would order cartons of Chinese takeout, the cardboard boxes filled to the brim with classics like shrimp lo mein, egg foo young, General Tso’s chicken and beef and broccoli.
After each meal the Philadelphia native, now in his late 30s, would crack open a fortune cookie, reading the tiny paper with its words of wisdom on one side and a string of lucky numbers on the other.
“You know, the lottery is very important in Black culture,” says Evans, recalling his earliest introduction to Chinese food.
Today, he’s on the other side 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 bold red and gold logo inspired by the cult 1985 movie “The Last Dragon,” nothing inside is quite as it seems.
The egg rolls are stuffed with collard greens, the lo mein topped with gumbo and a sweet and spicy chicken dish is named General Roscoe’s Chicken, after Roscoe Robinson Jr., the US Army’s first Black four-star general.
“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, earning him the Champion of Change award from the World’s 50 Best Restaurants in 2021.
This commitment extends to the messages inside his fortune cookies, many of which he writes himself.
Like many US city neighborhoods, Evans’ community once teemed with independent Chinese takeouts. But over the decades, they began to shutter their doors as the younger generations in the family-owned shops moved on.
In 2024, he took over one of those empty storefronts and opened his takeout restaurant, serving American Chinese food seasoned with the flavors of his roots.
Among Black Dragon’s most-beloved conversation starters are the fortune cookies, which are filled with the wit and wisdom of the Black community.
“I wanted to be culturally relevant with the food and the people I was serving,” says Evans.
The chef wrote around 40 sayings and gathered more from his Instagram followers.
His favorite? A line passed down from his mother: “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.”
Who actually invented the fortune cookie?
Black Dragon’s fortune cookies celebrate a fusion of communities, but the crunchy treats carry more history than most diners realize. They didn’t come from China, and likely not even from Chinese American restaurants.
Most research points to Japan, according to Yasuko Nakamachi. The Japanese author has been fascinated with fortune cookies since 1990, when she was a student traveling in New York, and cracked one open after a meal in a local Chinese joint.
The message described her perfectly: “You are someone who finds beauty in small things that others do not notice.”
It was a memory she returned to after stumbling on a book on the history of Japanese sweets, in which she saw something familiar: New Year’s sweets made from rice dough with written fortunes. Known as tsujiura gashi, or fortune-telling confections, these came from Kanazawa, a city in Japan’s Ishikawa prefecture.
She also found an illustration from Japan’s Edo period, between 1603 and 1868, showing a vendor making folded senbei — almost identical to modern fortune cookies.
The discoveries confirmed her suspicion: Japan has been making fortune cookies for hundreds of years.
Various forms of fortune-telling snacks still exist in Japan today. Centuries ago, however, they were likely reserved for the upper class — mainly because few could read — in places like geisha houses or on bustling streets in major 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 published her findings in a book, “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, much like today, offered light-hearted entertainment, giving customers a chance to socialize and share interpretations.
So how did the humble fortune cookie make its way across the Pacific and into Chinese takeaways in the US? Historians haven’t been able to come to a consensus.
Some businesses claim to have introduced them, including the Japanese bakery Fugetsu-do and the Hong Kong Noodle Company in Los Angeles.
Most experts, including Nakamachi, credit the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco. There, fortune cookies were eventually mass-produced by Benkyodo, a now-defunct sweets manufacturer.
Gary Ono, a descendant of Benkyodo’s owner, shared an iron cookie mold with Nakamachi, noting that his grandfather had built the first machine to make fortune cookies in the US.
Today, Nakamachi’s 20 years of research suggests that the cookies most of us are familiar with today were almost certainly inspired by these Japanese originals.
A crumbling industry
By the early 20th century, fortune cookies had become popular across the US and Canada, appearing in American Chinese and Japanese restaurants, including classic chop suey houses operated by both American Chinese and American Japanese proprietors.
Production at Japanese-run factories halted during World War II when many Japanese Americans were forced into internment camps. Chinese-owned factories filled the gap, popularizing fortune cookies in the following decades.
But traditional fortune cookie makers are disappearing. New York’s Wonton Food Company is now the largest manufacturer. The Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory, founded in 1962, is San Francisco’s only factory. Montreal’s Wing Noodles, Canada’s oldest, closed in 2025 after eight decades.
The Oakland Fortune Factory, meanwhile, has managed to revive interest in the treats. Founded in 1957, it’s the oldest surviving cookie factory in the Bay Area.
In 2016, Jiamin Wong, a first-generation Chinese immigrant, walked past the factory, which had changed little since the 1950s, saw it was for sale and bought it.
Jiamin’s daughter Alicia and her husband, Alex Issvoran, took over in 2018 and introduced some updates.
Much of the production line remains the same today — freshly baked cookies emerge from six monster machines, just as they did in the 1950s, and are hand-folded into their familiar crescent shapes while still hot and soft.
The traditional plastic-wrapped variations are, however, long gone.
“We have a seasonal catalog of cookies with different designs,” Issvoran tells CNN. “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 reputation through word-of-mouth, the factory now attracts custom orders from Silicon Valley companies. The owner says the writers of the Adult Swim cartoon “Rick and Morty” even penned messages for a limited-edition cookie.
In 2020, during 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 series for the Stop Asian Hate campaign.
“Oakland has a deep history of civil rights,” Issvoran says. The protests inspired the pair to do something to help their community.
“After the cookies came out, I got a few calls from customers we didn’t know. They said they cried when they opened the cookies and we realized we were doing something incredibly meaningful.
“Sometimes we get to be a part of moments like these.”
Issvoran says he’s learned that fortune cookies can be a tool to celebrate cultures while bringing people together.
“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.”
An evolving cross-cultural icon
For Nakamachi, seeing how fortune cookies evolved into an unlikely cultural icon in a foreign 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 fun at a restaurant, or as a carrier of important political and cultural messages.
Its adaptability has made it a timeless and gentle tool 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 people open their fortune cookies with their friends and family, they will share what’s written and pass on the knowledge, just like he and his mother used to, every Friday night.
The-CNN-Wire
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