Diners who have had one too many evenings surrounded by tiny cartons of greasy takeout should head to Manhattan's Shun Lee Palace to be reminded of what authentic Chinese food really tastes like.
It might be worth purchasing one of those tiny cigarette carton books just to see if the publisher's claim that each unabridged story is printed "with a type size that's easy to read" is somehow, improbably, true.
Sixty dollars can outfit a kitchen (with teacups, rice bowls, chopsticks and strainers, sponges shaped like kittens, and graters for daikon and wasabi), laundry room (with hampers and hangers) and office (with pens, paper and boxes to hold them), with funds leftover to spoil the kids (toys, elegantly patterned origami paper and erasers shaped like mini-milk cartons or tiny bowls of ramen).
De Silva then pulled out a black carton punctured with tiny squares and explained how the liquid and cells get dropped into each square.
Inside the certified green building, shoppers browsed the diminutive egg cartons filled with tiny chocolate blackberry syrah cupcakes at Enjoy Cupcakes, giant tomahawk chops at Belcampo Meat Co. and rows of fusti filled with California grown and milled olive oils from Il Fustino.
The bare white sides of the takeout carton must have seemed like tiny billboards for a company with something to sell.
Priced neatly in between, at $2.79, was the Darigold milk labeled as "coming from cows not treated with the growth hormone rBST*" The asterisk referred to tiny letters near the bottom of the carton indicating that the Food and Drug Administration says there is no difference between milk from treated and untreated cows.
Mr. McElroy, a lanky, clean-shaven 28-year-old who looks more likely to be playing an afternoon game of touch football than tinkering with the innards of a phone, is standing at a workstation littered with the detritus of his trade: tiny silver screws, peels of plastic and cartons overflowing with spare parts.
