Inside the Black-Owned Cafe Feeding Delco and Beyond
Everybody Eats Cafe serves up great food for an even greater purpose.
Chef Malik Ali / Photograph by Ed Newton
In celebration of Delco restaurants and the people who make them great, we are declaring this Delco Eats Week. Check back daily for stories from the sprawling print feature on the county’s food scene in the October issue of Philly Mag.
Everybody Eats. That’s the goal. That’s the mission. That’s the name of the organization started by Black chefs in Chester during that George Floyd and Black Lives Matter pandemic summer when it seemed like the whole world was falling apart right in front of our eyes.
Chefs Stephanie Willis (ex of the Garces organization), Malik Ali (from Noord and the Dutch), Kurt Evans (Black Dragon Takeout), Aziza Young (a private chef), and Gregory Headen (South) started Everybody Eats with the goal right there in the name: Feed people. All of them.
Beginning with neighborhood food giveaways, serving homemade meals and household supplies across folding tables in vacant lots in West Philly, they moved on to a corporate catering business. Vittles Food Hall in Delco came next, which gave them access to centralized kitchen space; storage; a way to bring affordable cheesesteaks, soul food, burgers, and breakfasts to the underserved community in Chester; and a home base for their charitable events and activations. They did pop-ups and partnered with Philabundance and Sharing Excess, and used the food hall as a place to center their training and mentorship programs — employing locals and (hopefully) kick-starting the careers of the next generation of cooks and chefs.
Fried fish hoagie / Photograph by Ed Newton
“But as a minority-led nonprofit, it was hard to get grants,” Willis tells me. “We needed to make some money. We got bills.”
So last year, Everybody Eats expanded again. They picked up a space at 16 West 5th Street in downtown Chester, just a block from City Hall, which gave them some needed kitchen space, and recently opened the Everybody Eats Cafe. Willis and Ali are running it as a for-profit business (which includes a film, corporate, and festival catering operation) with $7 breakfast sandwiches and $15 cheesesteaks balanced against farm-to-table bacon and egg platters with eggs from Smith Poultry, a local Black-owned farm, and dollar wing nights on Mondays. Like Vittles, the cafe is a hub — a headquarters for the community mission of Everybody Eats. And the money they make on those cheesesteaks and plates of fish and grits? That gets kicked right back into the next charitable project — whether that’s holding cooking classes in partnership with Making a Change Group or feeding the neighbors alongside local food security groups like Chester Eastside.
“That’s Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, 100 meals each day,” Willis tells me. “We feed the community.”
The money the cafe brings in is also being used to expand its footprint. In August, Everybody Eats opened the space next door for overflow seating on busy days, plus karaoke and movie nights. “We want everyone to come in and enjoy a seat at our table,” Willis says.
Because if you want to make the world better, first you have to change a city. And if you want to change a city, first you have to lift up a community. And if you want to lift up a community, first you have to help your neighbors. Feeding them can be the start of that.
But it doesn’t have to be the end.
Published as “Cafe With a Cause” in the October 2025 issue of Philadelphia magazine.
