The Fortune Cookie Chronicles (5 page)

she said.

She had a button nose and thinning red-tinted hair, which was cut into what is best described as a double mul et. Two tails of hair trailed down either side of her neck. She said she likes the ease of short hair but the feeling of having long hair. The double mul et was her solution.

In the 1970s, there were only a limited number of ways to earn a living as an immigrant woman in the United States, Misa explained. Opening a restaurant was one of them. She and a few others scraped together $25,000 from their savings and through loans from family and friends.

She was not the first restaurant owner to come up with the idea of hand-delivering food to people’s homes. Nor was she even the first Chinese restaurant owner to do so. Before World War I , John Kan’s Chinese Kitchen delivered piping hot food around San Francisco. In the late 1930s, Chinese restaurants in New York’s Chinatown were using automobiles to bring chop suey to people’s doors. Of course, delivery was not always the easy, spur-of-the-moment decision it is now. Even in the 1950s, some restaurants demanded twenty-four hours’ notice to bring a three-course meal to your door. But for whatever reason, none of those scattered services catalyzed the delivery frenzy the way Empire Szechuan did.

With delivery powering her business, Misa’s restaurant empire quickly expanded. In 1979, Empire Szechuan Gourmet received a one-star rating from t he
New York Times,
which was notable given its modest decor and no-nonsense service. The menu appealed to a more sophisticated crowd as yuppies began moving into the Upper West Side. They then added

Empire

Szechuan

Columbus,

Empire

Szechuan Balcony, and Empire Szechuan Bleecker.

Empire Szechuan moved into the West Vil age, the East Side, Long Island, Miami.

Flush with cash, Misa and her partners started investing in real estate, including the older eight-story building that held the original Empire Szechuan Gourmet. Eric, that first delivery boy, was promoted to a manager. He also married Misa’s daughter and became her son-in-law.

Misa herself had not had much schooling, but she’d always had a shrewd intuition for what her customers wanted before they even knew they wanted it. She began delivery at a time when two-career families were starting to become common. Misa hired women as waitresses at a time when Chinese restaurants general y hired only men. “They smile more,” she told me. She quickly expanded her menu when she felt that Chinese food was becoming stale. She introduced sushi to her restaurants so that couples wouldn’t have to fight about choosing Chinese or Japanese for dinner. She added pad thai to the menu when Thai food started gaining in popularity. She began a bubble-tea café in the restaurant to take advantage of the tapioca drink craze. She added a low-carb diet selection way before Atkins or South Beach hit the national radar. She knew when to upgrade the look of her restaurants away from red and gold to pastel neon, and again to the concrete, exposed brick, and recessed lighting of the turn of the mil ennium.

With Misa’s vision, Empire Sezchuan had a lock on the delivery market early on. Then it slowly dawned on others that there was no reason they could not make deliveries, too. The other Chinese restaurants entered the market—some of them learning from former employees of Empire Szechuan itself. Up and down Broadway, competing Chinese restaurants sprang up almost overnight in formerly shuttered storefronts, almost al with “Hunan” or

“Szechuan” in their names: Hunan Balcony. Hunan 94.

Hunan

Gourmet.

Szechuan

West.

Szechuan

Broadway. The deliverymen stuffed brown paper grocery bags with stacks upon stacks of menus, using rags to hide them from the watchful eyes of doormen and neighbors. Then other ethnic restaurants joined in the fray, seemingly in reverse order of the cuisine’s distance from China: Thai. Japanese. Indian. Soon it became a free-for-al , an ethnic smorgasbord.

The first signs of trouble appeared in the building entryways. Simple “No Menus” signs metamorphosed into more punctuation-adorned, aggressive postings of “No Menus! Of Any Type! Got It?” The signs were original y written in English, which did little to abate the problem, as the menu men general y weren’t literate in English. (As Eric Ma explained it to me, “If they understood English, would they be making deliveries?”) So the “No Menu” signs soon became bilingual, with Chinese characters. Next they turned trilingual and even quadrilingual, to combat what had become a multiethnic, multirestaurant siege. Then it wasn’t just restaurants anymore. Other businesses piled in: carpet cleaners, nail salons, dry cleaners, and even grocery stores. The flyers were stuffed into mailboxes, piled on lobby furniture, thrown in heaps on lobby floors, and shoved under doors. Residents and landlords argued that the flood of paper engulfing the Upper West Side was a health and safety hazard.

They feared that the accumulation of menus would alert burglars to when people were away. And what if it rained and someone slipped on a wet menu? Who would they sue? The menu guys were entering buildings by buzzing bel s and cheerful y announcing that they were from UPS. They were propping security doors open with rocks or fol owing residents in. At this point, it wasn’t just Empire Szechuan Gourmet that was papering the apartment buildings, but infuriated Upper West Siders felt it was the place at which they could point their fingers. Angry doormen would arrive at Empire Szechuan and dump a month’s worth of accumulated menus from their buildings, many of them from other establishments. One building complex in Harlem escorted menu men out in handcuffs, which immediately cut down on the flyer volume there.

The menu wars became violent on both sides, drawing blood in August 1994. One evening, a writer named Philip Carlo walked out of his building on West Eighty-eighth Street and spotted a lanky Chinese man putting menus from a restaurant cal ed China Barbecue in his vestibule, near where a bilingual “No Menu” sign had been placed.

Carlo told the deliveryman to stop and returned the menus to him. The deliveryman put them back down. Carlo picked them up again. The deliveryman put them down again. The back-and-forth over the menus turned into a shoving match, which turned into an exchange of punches that spil ed out onto the street. Carlo suffered a bloody nose, but he was evidently the better fighter; the deliveryman had a broken jaw. Carlo was convicted of assault and sent to Rikers Island for sixty days. The charges against the deliveryman were dropped. In a separate incident, a secretary, Jane O’Connor, was punched by an Empire Szechuan deliverer after tel ing him to stop dropping menus at her West Ninety-sixth Street building. She won a $2,000 judgment.

The local community board also used its political leverage to punish Empire Szechuan. It persuaded the Department of Transportation to oppose the renewal of the outdoor-café license administered by the Consumer Affairs Department.

Upper West Siders being Upper West Siders, they were not afraid to use the legal and judicial process to get their way. The New York State assemblyman for the Upper West Side, Scott Stringer (who would go on to become Manhattan borough president), introduced a bil that would quadruple the fine for distributing menus and other fliers on private properties that explicitly opposed them. But other New York City Council members expressed concerns over freedom of speech.

Misa, too, argued that the menus were little different from the political fliers that were distributed on the streets. Nonetheless, Empire Szechuan and Misa suffered setbacks. In 1994, a landlord named Saul Lapidus sued Empire Szechuan in smal -claims court for distributing menus in his two brownstones in the West Seventies. He told Empire Szechuan that he would charge it ten dol ars every time he had to clean up the menus. Empire Szechuan responded that the menus were protected by the First Amendment guarantee of free speech and that there was no proof that they’d been left by Empire Szechuan employees anyway. But the judge, Kibbie F. Payne, ruled that because building lobbies were private property, Empire Szechuan had no free-speech protection there. He said there was enough evidence to prove that the menus had been distributed by the restaurant and fined it $447.75 to compensate Lapidus for cleaning up the mess. Meanwhile, Misa had already been thinking ahead. She’d contacted the United States Postal Service to inquire about bulk postage rates. Empire Szechuan would begin distributing the menus by mail.

At lunch, Misa told me she had no regrets, even though her flood of menus had launched an angry backlash among New York City residents. “My workers have to feed their families,” she said. “We weren’t robbing or stealing from anyone.” Distributing menus was fair game, she felt.

Over the past three decades, she boasted to me, tens of thousands of Chinese immigrants have passed through her restaurants. “Sometimes I go traveling, I wil meet someone. They know me. They’ve worked for me,” she said. “For a lot of them, they are new immigrants. We give them a chance. They need the money.” Many of her former employees had been students who needed a toehold in America. “A lot of people are Ph.Ds. Some have been doctors. One has gone on to be an ambassador,” she noted.

I could not quite put my finger on why Empire Szechuan’s delivery service had created such a snowbal effect. Was it a timing issue? Delivery had existed, in tepid forms, prior to Misa’s arrival. Even during the 1970s, scattered pizza parlors and fried-chicken joints in New York City had offered delivery service. Many restaurants, Chinese and otherwise, did takeout. Some restaurants even had paper menus. There were a number of nice sit-down Chinese restaurants on the Upper West Side when the original Empire Szechuan Gourmet first opened: Moon Palace, Great Shanghai, Happy Family. Today al of them are gone. If Misa hadn’t come along with her vision of aggressive delivery, would it have occurred to someone else from those restaurants? Or perhaps Misa’s success had to do with choosing the right market, introducing delivery in the right New York neighborhood at the right time. The Upper West Side of Manhattan was densely packed with apartment buildings, co-ops, and brownstones. Women were moving into the workplace in larger numbers, and were looking for quick but healthy ways to feed their families when they didn’t have time to make home-cooked meals. Young professionals loved the idea that food could come from a phone rather than a stove.

But the more I thought about it, the more the whole situation seemed eerily familiar. A low-cost method of distributing advertising had led to indiscriminate carpetbombing of materials, which had led to copycat marketers, which had led to infuriated customers, which had led to a back-and-forth in judicial and legislative recourse, which had led to new ways to distribute advertising.

This was spam. Miss Chang had succeeded in part because she had understood the power of spam before anyone else. It wasn’t just about the service; it was about the marketing. I had met the proto-spammer.

The decision to buy the building on Broadway and Ninety-seventh Street turned out not to be the wisest business move for Misa’s partnership. “I know Chinese restaurants. But I don’t know real estate,”

Misa admitted. Managing an aging property, with its upkeep and building inspections, eventual y became too much of a headache. She and her partners sold to a landlord who wanted to turn that valuable spot over to Bank of America. Empire Szechuan Gourmet had to find a new home.

Misa decided to move the flagship restaurant to a preexisting spin-off on 100th Street, long nicknamed Empire Szechuan Junior. I watched her haggle, in her broken English, with the owner of a town-car service upstairs. She thought his company’s sign was ugly and offered to make him a new one that would fit better with the new Empire Szechuan decor.

The original Empire Szechuan on Broadway and Ninety-seventh Street shut down on October 4, 2005, after nearly twenty-nine years of business. Misa wasn’t at the restaurant for the formal closing, because it pained her. The restaurant was disassembled without much fanfare. By the next afternoon, the staff had moved to the new Empire Szechuan restaurant on 100th Street. It was open for business immediately.

The change attracted little attention. By then, neighborhood Chinese restaurants were nothing special. Other places, like the Vietnamese Saigon Gril , had intoxicated Upper West Siders with their exotic new cuisine.

Over time, it became clear that the 100th Street restaurant didn’t have the same visibility and traffic as the original location, which had been just a block away from a major crosstown bus line and an express subway stop. Business slowed.

Today, nearly every self-respecting restaurant in Manhattan, from neighborhood diners to high-end establishments, delivers. They have to, in order to survive. Over the years, Chicago, Washington, and Boston also jumped on the delivery bandwagon, though some other cities, like San Francisco, seem stubbornly resistant. Several years ago, many of my friends began murmuring about something cal ed SeamlessWeb. I had never encountered the service.

But my friends, particularly those in finance, consulting, and law, swore by it. At work, they could order lunch and dinner over a Web site and never have to see the bil . Even the tip could be set and bil ed directly to the company. Now it was possible to feed yourself without ever leaving your desk. No more turning in receipts stained with chicken tikka masala.