Menu Madness

When you think about ordering food in Manhattan, the first thing that probably crosses your mind is the thousands of restaurants in the city. There are so many choices to order from that you may think that the decision of where to eat is near impossible. Choosing a place to eat is extremely difficult but it’s not from the options out there.

After living in the city for a year and a half, I have learned that there are basically four options when ordering food: Chinese, Sushi, Deli, and other stuff. How is it possible that of all the genres out there we are left with these four? I can pin it down to one general reason. Everyday when I come home from work, there are anywhere between one and four delivery menus in my apartment. The local restaurants pay their delivery people to walk around apartment buildings and drop their menu under the door. When I first moved into the city, I thought this was the best concept ever. I didn’t even have to leave my apartment to select the take out menus I wanted; they would just appear every day. But 5 menus turned to 15. And 15 grew to 45. Now, I have a stack of 400 menus sitting in a drawer, some places having 3 or 4 of their menus representing. I guess the logic is that if you get the menu in the apartment, there’s a small probability that you will select their menu. Once I make the difficult decision of selecting Chinese, Sushi, Deli, or other stuff, then it’s down to sorting through the hundreds of menus I have and picking a place. After a while, they all start sounding the same, the prices are all in the same range, and very little distinguishes one from the other. For a restaurant to be selected by me to order from, it’s kind of like them winning the lotto. The grand payoff of this lottery, $8.50 for my Sweet and Sour Chicken Dinner Special but they earned it with their hard menu handing out strategy.

For some strange reason, the “other stuff” restaurants have not figured out the menu dropping strategy. So we’re all clear on what makes up the category, other stuff is comprised of many different genres such as Mexican, Pizza, Italian, and whatever else might be near your neighborhood. In my stack of 400 menus in my apartment, I think I have two Mexican menus both from the same place, one pizza menu for the infamous Pizza 33 which is very overrated, and maybe a Tai Food place. The key to winning the “where is Gary ordering from sweepstakes” is to get at least one entry in the game. You can’t win if you don’t play. It’s kind of like the NBA lottery; having more “balls” in selecting who gets the first overall pick gives you a better chance of winning. Same thing in ordering food, the more menus you have in the better chance you have of me picking it. The major problem with this analogy is that in the NBA, it’s the worst team in the league with the best chance. I’d hate to think that all this time I’ve been picking the worst and most unsanitary Chinese restaurants in the city just because they’re dropping a ton of menus under my door. But if they are, I’d have to say that I’m impressed with the effort and they earned my business.

Although this routine appears to be praise towards the menus under my door, it actually drives me nuts always walking into my apartment and stepping on menus. Eventually, I’m going to start blacklisting the restaurants who continually feed me menus. And I would love to catch those people in the act one day, just so I could hand him the 30 menus he’s littered in my apartment over the past year. Why should I throw out his garbage, he should take care of it himself. That’s all I have for now on food delivery, I think three routines is enough.