Xu has an office, is the heart of the Chinese-menu industry. At the center of the room sat the company workhorse, a 35-foot-long press that spat out menus at a rate of three per second, drawing paper from a giant roll 40 inches in diameter.Ĭome to Chinatown's Market Street any morning, and these rolls can be seen everywhere, being trundled out of trucks and into storefronts. Xu walked about, compulsively clearing jammed sheets from the machines that print 100,000 menus a day, men in tank tops oiled cogs and daubed rollers with ink.
#Nytimes chinese restaurants full#
Xu is the owner of Jin Printing, one of New York's larger printers of Chinese menus, and he told the story while standing just outside the long room full of presses that is the hot, noisy heart of his company. "But he wrote down 'General Lee.' Our guys said, 'That's the wrong spelling.' He got the proof and he wrote it again - 'General Lee.' So I asked him why." Turned out that the restaurateur was a former soldier whose last name was Lee.
"Usually in restaurants, they serve General Tso's Chicken," Mr. Wei's boss, Nelson Xu, a youthful 42-year-old with a thick black brush-cut, was reminiscing about a New Jersey restaurateur, one of the various eccentric clients he has encountered in his 15 years of designing and printing Chinese menus.
Red pen in hand, he fixed misspellings ("loster" to "lobster") and revised the list of dishes, consulting notes supplied by his client. IN a small cluttered room in a Canal Street basement, Wei Yao sat at a rickety table and proofread a Chinese menu.
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