Chinese Takeout
Chinatown was filled with restaurants by 1901, and there were dozens more
Chinese restaurants above 14th Street. The food quickly developed a
following among New Yorkers from all over the city, who loved the unfamiliar
flavors and bargain prices, and almost from the beginning, they wanted to
take it home. “Few Bohemian gatherings are complete without a pail of chop
suey, brought, fresh and hot, from Chinatown,” noted the New York Tribune
in 1903. But according to Jennifer 8. Lee’s’s Fortune Cookie Chronicles,
home delivery of Chinese takeout as we know it today—free and ubiquitous—
was only a dream until 1976, when Empire Szechuan Gourmet, at Broadway and
97th Street, began distributing menus in nearby apartment buildings and
offering free delivery. Once other Chinese restaurants saw the success of
this innovation, they jumped on board, and soon a table strewn with white
cartons, paper-wrapped chopsticks, and plastic packets of soy sauce became a
recognizable motif of home life in New York.
