It’s almost impossible for Greg Dulan, owner of the longtime soul food gathering spot Dulan’s on Crenshaw, to walk outside his restaurant without a passerby shouting out a greeting or sharing a reminiscence.
“You know who you look like?” asked one woman who approached him on the sidewalk along L.A.’s Destination Crenshaw corridor recently. “Adolf. Adolf Dulan. I remember when he first came into business. He had a catering truck. It was right there on Rodeo. That was more than 50 years ago.”
“Oh, boy,” said the restaurateur, who is this year’s winner of the Los Angeles Times’ Gold Award. “That was my dad. I’m Greg Dulan. Thank you for the memory.”
Dulan’s roots in the neighborhood are deep. When you walk into his restaurant, which reopened last year after two years of construction to expand and modernize the space, the walls are covered with reminders of his history.
“We tell the story of one African American family,” Dulan said, “from the end of slavery to today.”
His great grandfather, Benjamin Franklin Dulan, seen in one of the restaurant’s many black-and-white photos with the patriarch’s wife, Annie Dulan, and seven of 14 children, was born in 1865 and traveled from Missouri to Oklahoma, “where he signed up to participate in the Oklahoma land run in 1889,” said Dulan. “He was able to secure an 80-acre farm where our family comes from.”
Another picture shows his grandmother surrounded by chickens on that family farm in Luther, Okla. “I don’t know if it’s true,” Dulan noted, “but they said she was getting ready to make fried chicken.”
Amid the trove of memorabilia — including photos of the many dignitaries, celebrities and politicians on the campaign trail who have come through the restaurant since its 1992 opening — there is one artifact that Dulan calls “my most prized possession.”
Framed under glass are two faded yellow legal pad sheets, taped together to form a scroll-like document with the name “GREG” handwritten across the top in oversize capital letters and the time and date in the upper right-hand corner: 4:45 a.m, May 26, 1978.
Underneath, outlined in Roman numbers with key words underlined twice, is business advice from his late father that concluded with this directive to his oldest son: “If you are ever going to be a business man, this will be your bible to use … [for] ‘making the nut.’ … You must start this job 6-1-78 without fail!!”
At that point, Adolf Dulan, a social worker-turned-entrepreneur, who started out with an Orange Julius franchise, had established his first independent restaurant, Hamburger City, which he expanded into a small fast-food chain. The elder Dulan later open the Southern food mecca Aunt Kizzy’s Back Porch and would become known in many parts of Los Angeles as “the king of soul food.”
But what neither father nor son knew back in 1978 is that a few years after that 4 a.m. missive, Adolf Dulan would fire his son from the family restaurant.
Greg Dulan, whose first restaurant jobs involved a lot of onion chopping at his dad’s Orange Julius and Hamburger City, graduated from Howard University and spent time working in New York’s banking industry. He returned to Los Angeles in 1984 to help his father and stepmom, Mary, convert one of the family’s least profitable Hamburger City locations into Aunt Kizzy’s Back Porch, a name inspired by Leslie Uggams’ “Roots” character Kizzy Kinte. Located in Marina del Rey, it was one of the first Los Angeles-area restaurants to serve soul food in a largely white neighborhood.
“I came back with ideas that were different from my dad,” said Greg Dulan, who had gotten an up-close view of what made a small business work from his time working in the Bronx office of what was then Chase Manhattan Bank. “My ideas were so different that he fired me.”
All these years later, Greg Dulan — a three-time nominee for a James Beard Award as best restaurateur — can’t specify which ideas especially riled his father. But he does remember what happened next. Perhaps to soften the rejection, Adolf Dulan suggested his son might start a catering business.
“He said, ‘People are requesting catering and I hate catering,’” Greg Dulan said his father told him.
“I didn’t realize it at the time, but when he fired me, he wanted to see me be successful. While I was very angry and upset with him,” said the restaurateur, “it turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me.”
But there were hard lessons to learn first.
“We got a call from the Los Angeles Raiders,” Dulan said. The team was doing a video shoot and food was needed. “My dad said, ‘OK, son, this is your shot.’
“They said, ‘We have 60 players.’ I took enough food for 70 people so I’d have a little extra. But as soon as I saw the first football player, I knew I was in trouble. I was by myself so one of the players offered to help serve the peach cobbler.” Bad decision. “I looked over and two of my three peach cobbler trays were gone and only five players had gone through the line.”
He asked his “helper” to step aside and managed to portion out the food so everyone had something on their plates. “You learn from your mistakes. When they tell you 50 football players, you’ve got to take food for 250 people.”
Operating out of Aunt Kizzy’s after opening hours and later in his own space, young Dulan spent his nights prepping food for catering jobs and his mornings learning to improve his cooking techniques from chef Flossie Vence (a.k.a. Miller), who had closed her own soul food restaurant in Palos Verdes to work for the Dulan family.
“She was the best cook I’ve ever seen,” Greg Dulan said. “No recipes. Everything in her head. You send her in a room with a cup of flour, cold butter and a teaspoon of sugar and she’d come out with with a beautiful cake. She taught me how to cook.” (She later went to Torrance and opened Flossie’s Southern Cuisine, known for its fried chicken and Mississippi Delta-style hot tamales, until its 2015 closing.)
By 1992, with Aunt Kizzy’s thriving but much of the city in need of investment after the L.A. riots that spring, Greg Dulan was ready to start a restaurant of his own. Using the family name, he opened Dulan’s on Crenshaw in the heart of Black L.A. serving his interpretation of classic soul food. Almost immediately, the restaurant was seen as a vital part of the community, with pastors such as the esteemed Rev. Cecil Murray of First African Methodist Episcopal Church “beseech[ing] his flock,” as former Times reporter Nina J. Easton wrote of the then-1-month-old restaurant, “to try the sour cream waffles and smothered chicken.”
Nearly 10 years later, in 2001, Adolf Dulan — inspired by a New York trip when Greg’s younger brother, Terry Dulan, gave their father a tour of cafeteria restaurants — opened Dulan’s Soul Food Kitchen, first in Inglewood, then on Century Boulevard near Jesse Owens Park.
The Dulan name had become a soul food powerhouse.
However in 2002, business at the Crenshaw restaurant had slowed just at the moment Greg Dulan was presented with an opportunity to provide meals for the Los Angeles Unified School District. He closed the restaurant and for several years returned to his catering roots.
“I started off with 200 meals a day and grew the business to over 10,000 meals a day,” he said. “It was great until competitors came from other parts of the state into the Los Angeles market and started a pricing war.”
In 2012, with his LAUSD business winding down, Greg Dulan took stock and noticed a dwindling number of soul food restaurants in Los Angeles. He decided to reopen Dulan’s on Crenshaw, switching from its previous sit-down format to the cafeteria style his father had found success with at Dulan’s Soul Food Kitchen. In a stroke of good timing, the restaurant opened the week before the Space Shuttle Endeavour was towed from LAX to the California Science Center through the streets of Los Angeles. Dulan’s on Crenshaw became one of the key gathering spots to watch the spectacle, giving free publicity to the revived business.
“Not only did my original customers come back,” he said, “they came back with their children and, in some cases, their children’s children. So I had three generations. We were able to pick up where we left off.”
Since then, he’s worked diligently to ensure that soul food remains an integral part of the mosaic that makes up Los Angeles cuisine. It’s just one of the reasons Greg Dulan is this year’s winner of the L.A. Times Gold Award. As this paper’s late restaurant critic Jonathan Gold put it in 2017 when he established the prize, the Gold Award is given to a local chef or restaurateur “with the idea of honoring culinary excellence and expanding the notion of what Southern California cooking might be.”
“We have so many people in the city who have deep roots in the soul food tradition,” said Greg Dulan. “In addition, there are a lot of people who have never experienced soul food. A big city like Los Angeles needs soul food.”
Indeed, whenever he can, Dulan helps out other chefs and entrepreneurs in need of advice and sometimes partnerships. When Kim Prince, a daughter of the family who brought the world Nashville hot chicken, lost her Hotville Chicken space in the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza, he teamed up with her to create the Dulanville food truck. He didn’t want to see the city lose Prince’s essential fried chicken.
After this year’s fires in Altadena and the Pacific Palisades, Dulan and Prince were quick to bring their Dulanville truck to the affected neighborhoods, often starting work at 5 a.m. to serve hot meals to those who had lost their homes.
Recently, however, Dulan himself has needed a helping hand.
Earlier this summer he posted a callout to the community on social media: “I bought some adjacent real estate with the goal of building parking for the restaurant and a culinary kitchen for training and workforce development,” he said on a video collaboration with radio station KJLH. “The real estate portion is dragging down the restaurant. The restaurant is doing great but the overall business is in trouble and maybe won’t survive unless I get some kind of support.”
The expansion of L.A. Metro’s K Line also put pressure on the business. “We lost a lot of parking,” Dulan said.
To mitigate the Metro line’s damage to the neighborhood, the nonprofit Destination Crenshaw is creating an open-air museum of Black art and culture. These efforts helped prompt Dulan’s most recent renovation. He’s transformed the space back into a sit-down restaurant and was involved in commissioning a mural along the side the restaurant by Terrick Gutierrez depicting scenes of Black life. The costs of rebuild further stretched his cash flow.
“I can run a successful restaurant,” he said, “but real estate development is a whole different animal.”
Fortunately, the community has responded and for the moment at least, Dulan is out of the woods.
“We’re getting calls from a lot of celebrities and people from the community,” he said. “Revenue is up 40% at the restaurant.”
Most important, an angel investor emerged to help Dulan refinance the business and even help him expand his operation preparing heat-and-serve meals for the Hyde Park location of Vallarta supermarket. He’s also hoping to put in a successful bid to help feed athletes and visitors when the 2028 Olympic games come to Los Angeles.
“I had no idea that my little soul food restaurant would go viral,” Dulan said of the community response, “but apparently we built up a lot of goodwill that I underestimated.”
The post The Times’ 2025 Gold Award: How the son of the king of soul food found his own way at Dulan’s on Crenshaw appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
