Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 13, 1991 TAG: 9103130050
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Medium
Chopsticks, fortune cookies and cardboard containers - the various trappings of Chinese takeout - are all the rage at a downtown Manhattan gallery.
The walls of the Franklin Furnace Museum are plastered with 5,000 menus. Restaurant shopping bags hang from the ceiling. A life-size, delivery-man doll perches on a bicycle in the window.
The exhibit, "A Million Menus," is described as a celebration of Chinese takeout food in America. It was put together by Harley Spiller, the museum's administrative director and self-described "obsessive collector."
Spiller combined the unusual with the mundane.
A 1916 menu of the Oriental Restaurant in Chinatown shows an early example of takeout. "We put up orders so that they may be taken home," it reads.
The Peking Duck House supplied a menu autographed by a loyal patron, former Mayor Edward Koch.
There's a copy of a letter that then-Vice President Richard Nixon sent to the Chinese American Restaurant Association in 1958 congratulating the organization on its 26th anniversary.
And there's the fortune cookie.
An entire glass case is devoted to them, which Spiller says are as Chinese as chicken chow mein. His favorite fortune: "He loves you as much as he can, but he cannot love you very much."
Visitors can peruse scores of business cards and calendars from Chinese restaurants or enter a fortune-writing ontest.
A bag of "Crispy Chinese TV Snacks" is attached to a television that plays a videotape of deliverers at work.
The exhibit has drawn thousands since it opened Feb. 15 on the Chinese New Year, Spiller said. Schoolchildren squeal in delight at the 8-foot chopsticks his father carved for the show, and sometimes, pedestrians wander in thinking the museum is a Chinese restaurant.
Spiller, who grew up in Buffalo and attended Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., said he began gathering Chinese menus 10 years ago when he moved to Manhattan.
An English major in college, Spiller said he started collecting the menus because he liked looking for mistakes in grammar. The hobby soon turned into an obsession.
"It was out there, free, and I took it in," he said.
"When I grew up, Chinese food was a treat on a Sunday night. In New York, it was everywhere."
After receiving a grant for the show about two years ago, Spiller widened his search. He enlisted the help of friends and family, contacted chambers of commerce, and mailed out requests for menus and other items to restaurants around the country.
Spiller said one purpose of the show is to make clear that Chinese takeout food is a U.S. phenomenon. "There's a lot more to Chinese culture than food," he said.
Spiller hopes to take the show on the road after it closes at the Tribeca gallery on Saturday. After perhaps touring U.S. cities, he dreams of traveling to the Far East.
He thinks people in Taiwan or Hong Kong will "get a hoot" out of microwave chow mein and Stella D'Oro fortune cookies.
by CNB