On Century Boulevard, just down the road from the $2.6 billion sports complex soon to be built for Stan Kroenke's newly minted Los Angeles Rams, an entirely different kind of place already has crowds of local residents in their Sunday finest lining up out the door – Dulan's Soul Food Kitchen, owned and operated by 81-year-old "king of soul food" Adolf Dulan.
"A whole lot of things are going to happen because of them bringing in the Rams and all of the hotels and whatever else is happening," Dulan said. "And if we are right here in the middle of this, with an original, authentic American restaurant, I think we'll do well, and I'm sure that the community and other people coming through will love us."
Dulan's Soul Food Kitchen has one other Inglewood location, on Manchester Boulevard about a mile northwest of the new stadium site. It's the kind of place where the cashier seems just as happy to see you as you are to see their food, and where Inglewood residents are likely to bump into a neighbor or a local pastor.
They serve the classics of American soul food: fried chicken, smothered pork chops, braised oxtail, collard greens, mashed potatoes, cornbread muffins – the comfort food that Dulan said every black child growing up in the South ate at home. It's the food that Dulan has fond memories of his mother cooking for him and his siblings growing up in Oklahoma.
With the coming influx of new visitors to the heavily Black city of Inglewood, Dulan is excited to introduce a new crowd to soul food.
"The thing that you notice nowadays, what they're talking about is diversity," he said. "More people of different ethnic backgrounds, different races, being brought together and not separated out. It's going to be a kind of opportunity for us on the main street for a lot of different people going to see the Rams play and going to concerts here to be exposed to us."
He has experience with that already. In 1982 he opened what he believed to be the first Black-owned and operated restaurant in Marina del Rey selling hamburgers, and a few years later switched to serving Southern home cooking in the mostly white and affluent seaside community.
"That business in that area exploded, and we had a lot of the professional basketball teams, football teams, college teams, movie stars coming in," said Terry Dulan, who recently moved from Brooklyn after working on Wall Street for 25 years to help his father Adolf run the family business. The walls of Dulan's restaurants hold photographic evidence of these celebrity customers – Willie Nelson, Whoopi Goldberg, Magic Johnson, all smiling ear-to-ear along with Adolf.
"It grew beyond I think our wildest dreams," Terry added. "We found out that a lot of people had had the food and were familiar with the food, but they just hadn't had it since they lived down south."
Since then, the Marina del Rey restaurant, Aunt Kizzy's Back Porch, has closed. Adolf opened Dulan's Soul Food Kitchen on Manchester 15 years ago, and added the Century Boulevard location five years ago.
The restaurants, and Adolf Dulan himself, are vitally intertwined with the community. Adolf said he focuses on hiring local, low-income residents for his restaurants. Awards and accolades hang on the walls next to the pictures with celebrities, and Terry said his father is preparing to accept another from the Inglewood Chamber of Commerce soon for businessman of the year.
Adolf said that ultimately, he believes the new stadium will be good for Inglewood as well as for his business.
"You know, something like that comes into the community and it rejuvenates the community," he said. "There's just more money moving around."
But the Dulans temper their excitement for the business' future with the acknowledgement that the multibillion-dollar complex down the street will likely alter the makeup of the community and force some local business owners out. Terry saw exactly that happen in Brooklyn when the Barclays Center opened in 2012.
"The rents all went up. When those leases were up, they were out," he said. "It helps the area and everything, but a lot of people do tend to get pushed out, you know what I mean?"
Fortunately for Adolf and Terry Dulan, they won't have to worry about skyrocketing rent prices when the Inglewood stadium opens. They own the land under both of their restaurants. In fact, they're preparing to open a third location just east of Inglewood in the coming weeks.
"They can't squeeze us out," Adolf said with a laugh.
Annenberg Media