Help in my quest to collect the take-out menus from every Chinese restaurant in the USA!

Crazy, I know, but even half of them would make an enormous stack, physically conveying the impact of Chinese restaurants as a collective phenomenon in this country. And while I’m accumulating them, I can use them for other things, like my statistical analysis of crab rangoon prices.

Wherever you go, any Chinese restaurant you see, please pick up a menu for me. Mail them to:

Indigo Som
P. O. Box 5053
Berkeley CA 94705

If you’re so diligent a collector that postage becomes an issue, I’ll reimburse you. You can also email me at indigo@well.com with names and locations of restaurants if you couldn’t get a menu. Dreading that 2-hour layover in the Dallas airport next week? Instead of reading trashy magazines, further the cause of art by copying some Chinese restaurant names from the Yellow Pages.

The only limitation: I live in Berkeley and will go get local menus myself. The rest of the country is fair game! And if you're somewhere in Kenya or Peru and they have takeout menus, I'll be happy about those too. But leave those Hong Kong restaurants alone!

MENU FAQs

Are you still collecting menus? If you're reading this, then I am still collecting menus! Please send them! It's going to take a long, long time to get even close to having most of them.

How many menus do you have now? I don't know, because I don't keep a running tally. As of June 2004 they are almost completely filling up a generic office file box (you know, those cardboard ones you fold together yourself). That's probably a few hundred. I have a looong way to go....

How many people have sent menus? I'm not keeping count of that either. More than 50. Less than 100. I have sincere intentions to send thank you notes to each & every one of you, but I haven't had time. I am very, very appreciative, though!

Is it okay if the menu is stained/rolled/written on/folded/spindled/mutilated? Yes. I think the only reason I wouldn't want it is if it's really nasty &/or mostly illegible.

Do you still need menus from [your state]? Yes! I am very far from reaching saturation levels for any state. Like I said, it's gonna take a while. So please send them! As of June 2004 I still don't have a single menu from Pennsylvania—what's up with that?? (13 other states too, but some of those are very sparsely populated.)

How about menus from pan-Asian restaurants, or Chinese & Japanese restaurants, do you want those too? Yes! Chinese food & donuts, Chinese food & Hofbrau, they all count!

What about old or vintage menus? Yes, please, those are good too.

Basically, when in doubt: send me the menu! Thank you!