It’s about an hour before dinner service, and Kurt Evans is working on an appetizer. This dish doesn’t require mincing, chopping, searing, or slicing—in fact, it has only three ingredients, and most cooks make it without the luxury of a kitchen.

The chef opens two bags of puffy orange cheese doodles to let the air out, then mashes the snacks into a powder in the bag with his hands. Next, he crumbles in spicy shrimp-flavored ramen noodles and seasoning, then a little hot water. Evans massages the bags to combine the ingredients, presses the mixture to the bottom of each bag, and rolls the packages up to let the ingredients hydrate.  

Chi chi ingredients before the addition of hot water.

This is chi chi, and it’s typically made in a prison cell by inmates, pooling snack foods that can be bought at the prison commissary or vending machines. Sometimes it’s pressed into a sort of loaf—resembling ground beef, especially if it’s made with electric-red Flamin’ Hot Cheetos—and other times it’s looser, more like noodles in a chunky sauce. It’s an essential supplement to prisoners’ diet of limited, unpalatable-by-design prison food. In addition to the base of ramen and chips or Cheetos, a batch of chi chi may include pieces of other snacks like Slim Jims, beef jerky, string cheese—whatever the cooks can get their hands on to dress up the dish.

Rather than cooking in a prison cell, however, Evans is preparing tonight’s batch of chi chi in a restaurant, where it will be served to guests attending his End Mass Incarceration (EMI) dinner series. Held throughout Philadelphia, the multicourse meals feature an amuse bouche of chi chi followed by a slate of Evans’s cooking, ranging from farm-to-table fare to soul food staples. Also on the menu is a discussion facilitated by a formerly incarcerated Black man, meant to engage diners around issues related to the U.S. criminal justice system, which incarcerates Black people at a rate of about five times higher than whites.

While the first event took place in January at Rx The Farmacy, a brunch spot just off the University of Pennsylvania campus, the dinner Evans is preparing on this Sunday in February is hosted by El Compadre, a torta and taco mecca in South Philly’s Italian Market neighborhood. Between the two series dinners he has hosted so far, Evans has served—and educated—around 50 diners, and he’s raised about $1,000 for two prison-related nonprofits.

The goal for the EMI dinner series is to make the problem of mass incarceration a household conversation, says Evans. “It’s easy for those affected by it, including family and friends of those in the system, to be forgotten. But through discussion, we can keep them in the front of our minds, [and] community members can troubleshoot and devise plans to fix the broken system.” 

In the chef’s West Philly community and in his family, incarceration was commonplace. When he was a kid and the uncle he looked up to the most was locked up, “I wanted to go to jail too—that’s what I knew,” says Evans. “He told me that’s not what you want to do.”

Coming Up in the Restaurant Industry 

Chef Kurt Evans hopes the dinner series he is organizing will shine a light on the issue of mass incarceration.

Evans, who is Black, started his cooking education early. When he was young, his mother worked for Aramark food services and would take him to work in a hospital cafeteria with her. There, he learned the basics from the guys in the kitchen as long as he stayed out of sight. After that, he worked his way up to fine-dining kitchens in Philadelphia, reading up on recipes and techniques to expand his skill set. (His personal cookbook library totals close to a thousand.)

Evans started his own high-end catering business, Signature Catering, in 2014 and later ran Route 23, a neighborhood restaurant in the city’s Germantown section. Overseeing the restaurant, he found himself hiring kitchen staff who couldn’t get work elsewhere because they’d been incarcerated.

“Being a small business owner, I didn’t have [applicants] do background checks,” says Evans, “but these guys come to you truthfully.” Since he had a similar background and understood their challenging situation, Evans didn’t judge. “[My business partner] at the time would say, ‘If we don’t give them a shot, who will?’”

While Evans was coming into his own as a chef and restaurateur, he got connected to Cristina Martinez and Benjamin Miller, chef-owners of South Philly Barbacoa (now El Compadre). The couple have used the critical praise they’ve received from local and national food media to raise awareness about the injustice and risk faced by undocumented workers, especially in the service industry. (Martinez has publicly come out as undocumented to draw attention to this issue.) 

Evans served as a guest chef for Martinez and Miller’s #Right2Work dinner series, a similar program that uses meals as a way to educate the community; he also closed his restaurant during their A Day Without Immigrants protest last year.

With all this in mind, he decided he wanted to do something to help a cause that affected his own community.