"take-out menu" news and stories

This weekend, there's going to be a 10-foot pastrami sandwich at the Brooklyn Flea, but, despite the fast-food bigger-is-better craze, no one will dare you to eat it. This inedible behemoth is the latest structure from New York artist and School of Visual Arts professor Kevin O'Callaghan, and that meat is all rubber. That tooth-pick tassel? It's made from old menus. Your old take-out menus, in fact.

The unveiling of the large-scale piece, along with a 10-foot packet of take-out essentials (utensils, condiments, napkin), is the end of a week-long press run for SeamlessWeb.com, the international online food-delivery and takeout site. Their new campaign involves the slogan "(Less Paper) More Eat," and a big red truck circling the city to collect consumers' old menus. In exchange, you get a fortune cookie with a redemption code to use on the site's 5,000 featured restaurants in 27 cities across the U.S, as well as in London. And they've enlisted O'Callaghan to turn those paper menus into a piece of art. (FYI, he also designed the stage at the MTV Video Music Awards and is the subject of the newly released book, Monumental: The Reimagined World of Kevin O'Callaghan, which chronicles his long career.)

I don't know about you, but I hate coming home to take-out menus stuffed in my door, or left on my porch. Oh, if only I lived in New York.

Apparently there's a new law in New York state that any kind of unwanted advertising cannot be left on a property, and the city of New York has just started enforcing it. The property owner will have to post something that specifically states that they don't want the advertisements and that must be highly visible. There's also a whole complaint process that the sanitation department has worked out, and the fines start at $250.

Check out this article in the New York Times City Pages for more information.

[via Grub Street]