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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