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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