Best Results Organizing

*It is a truth universally acknowledged  that a student in possession of a dorm (but no kitchen), an apartment-dweller exhausted by cubically-corporate drudgery or a home-owning suburban parent wearied by carpools, must be in want of a take-out menu.

Take-out.  Take-away.  Delivery.  Menus appear in our mailboxes, on our doorknobs, and in the case of city-dwellers and dorm-doyennes, under the doors.  Recently, a blogger in Scotland complained about not knowing what to do with her “take away curry menus” on the same day a new client of mine mentioned she’d not quite gotten the knack as to where to put pizza menus and coupons.  Those homeless papers were timeless (her kids always wanted pizza) and timely (those zip code-based coupons had expiration dates in indecipherably small fonts), and deserved proper homes.

If you never crave take-out and never have a yen for delivery, we’ll see you next week.  The rest of us, whether we hate to cook or just need a break every once in a while, know the pain of not being able to find the phone number of the Chinese restaurant that makes the perfect Crab Rangoon (whose ownership, and therefore the name, has changed three times since the last phone book was printed), because the clutter of delivery and take-out menus was overtaken by a child-sized soda spill or a doggie-turned-goat paper-noshing disaster. 

Take-out menu clutter ends here.  Now. With three simple questions:

1)  Do You Even Need the Actual Paper Menus?  If not:

• Phone It In

If you generally order ahead (or for delivery) from the same two or three restaurants so often that they assume you’ve got them on speed dial, then put them on speed dial! 

Seriously, if you usually know what you want, won’t care if the price has gone up 49 cents (OK, so not you, college dudes) and want to order ahead so you can pick your food up without a lengthy wait (or hope to beat the delivery guy by no more than five minutes), just program in the phone number for your favorite spot.  While it can’t hurt to program the number into your home phone, too, just to speed up the process, having these numbers in your cell phone guarantees that you won’t have that driving home debate over whether limp celery and 400 speed film can constitute dinner.  Just call your favorite dining establishment with your order, thank them for making your dinner, and drive home (or for pick-up) with your serenity intact.

• Go Digital

Pizza franchises are the most likely restaurants to have menus (with current prices) posted on their web sites, but lots of the local eat-in/carry-out places you love, even the Mom-and-Pop restaurants, have probably recognized that a web site is an essential part of the marketing arsenal. If so, bookmark your favorite restaurants in a bookmarks or favorites folder with an apt title, like TakeOutMenus, so the kids or the babysitter can pull up the menus quickly and easily.) 

2)  Are You a Practical Diner?

If your goal in ordering in or carrying out is merely to spend as little time as possible looking for the number, identifying the food options and finding out how long your requested order (with the special quirks), will take, you probably don’t care about the aesthetics of your menu collection.  You just want to get rid of the piles decoupaging themselves to the top of the microwave.  If so, there are three simple D-I-Y options:

Stick the menus on a bulletin board in the kitchen.  Note, no matter how aesthetically pleasing the bulletin board is, this only works if you’re in college, grad school or law/medical school. If you’ve been out of school more than six months, you’ll have to accept that menus don’t equal wallpaper in the grown-up world.

Toss the menus in a manila folder (or clip them to a clipboard)  The quickest, simplest way to deal with hiding the menu clutter is to toss it all in a folder labeled “Take-Out Menus” and keep it in the same kitchen drawer as your telephone book.  It won’t be organized, per se, but it will rid your home of the piles of menu clutter.  Similarly, you can clip the menus to a clipboard and slide that into a drawer, provided the “clippy” part is low-profile and won’t cause the drawer to stick.

Make a menu book.  If you order take-out or delivery frequently, this is really your best option.  It’s easy, and if your kids are old enough to read from the menus, they’re old enough for you to delegate pretty much all of the labor.  Simply:

1. Flip through the menus to discard the ones for any places you’ve never eaten (and are not seriously tempted to try) or from those which you are sure you will never order again. (Negative dining memories guide future behavior!)
2. Sort by cuisine ethnicity or type:  American, BBQ, Chinese, deli, Greek (Paper Doll‘s favorite), Indian, Italian, Mexican and so on.
3. Slot each menu into a plastic sheet protector, and group each cuisine type together in a 3-ring binder.  Use tape flags, Post-It notes or index dividers to separate individual sections.
4. Clip coupons to the inside front cover of the binder with a giant paper clip or alligator clip.  If traffic or work often keeps you from getting home on time, consider clipping a $20 for the babysitter or your teens so they can order and pay without delay.
5. Extra credit:  Create a cheat sheet by putting a few pieces of notebook paper at the front of the binder to keep track of important reminders, like needing to order extra chopsticks or avoiding ordering the large cheese sticks because the small order is more than enough.
6. Extra, extra credit:  Let the kids (or, for you dorm-dwellers, your pizza-bogarting friends) grab the crayons and markers to create artistic section dividers and even a cover (which can be slid into most binders’ plastic cover sheet slot, allowing for re-use of the binder for other purposes).

Tuck the binder next to the cookbooks, behind the phone, next to the microwave or in the drawer–wherever it’s convenient and can be kept clean and away from stove-top splatters, safe in the knowledge that favorite meals are just a phone call away.

This is also an excellent option if you’re the go-to gal or guy in your office for organizing lunch orders. Your colleagues will be amazed at the speed and skill with which you are able to identify which establishments offer free delivery or manage to get 30 disparate orders straight.

3)  Are you a Designer Diner Diva?

If even the D-I-Y binder option is too downscale for you, you can purchase any number of decorative binders/notebooks for the purpose of corralling your take-out menus.  However,  Paper Doll would be remiss in her mission to help you organize (and save) little green pieces of paper if she did not mention that the money spent on “cute” could be better spent on appetizers.  Some attractive options include the following:

KnockKnock’s The Takeout Menu Organizer
  is also available at Uncommon Goods, Amazon, and Delight.com.  Like the Do-It-Yourself version I suggested, it’s a three ring binder with nine tabbed category dividers. (In lieu of hygienic plastic sheet protectors, this option uses paper storage pockets.)  But for those who need a little extra, it includes tips on ordering take-out, math assistance for tipping, a pen, a cheat-sheet for writing out your order before you call, and a pad for frequently-called numbers.

Another option, also called The Takeout Menu Organizer uses the same white/translucent stylings popularized by the Peter Walsh’s made-for-Office-Max [In]Place System. 

This three-ring binder system includes a zippered pen/pencil pouch (in case menus aren’t the only thing you have trouble keeping organized), two ballpoint pens, and two dry erase markers for writing on the clear menu sleeves (in lieu of the sheet protectors I’ve suggested or the sturdy paper folder/pockets noted in the prior example). The system also includes an order pad, in case you’re having trouble remembering everyone’s preferences, a set of service record stickers (so you can rate each restaurant’s quality of service for future reference), six tabbed section dividers with labels, and thirty clear sleeves for menus.  This version can be found at Crane & Co. (Yes, the famed and classy stationery people. Somehow, Paper Doll imagined that the people with divine stationery wardrobes never ordered take-out.  Silly, classist me.)

If you aren’t a fan of three-ring binders, there are also spiral options for organizing your take-out menus, including Meadowsweet Kitchens’ variety of upscale (metallic fiberboard)  and cozy down-home  take-out menus, and  Jersey Shore Gift’s Van Gogh-themed menu notebook .

Sigh.

And then there’s Bob Newhart.  While the initial inspirations for this post were the Scottish blogger and my client, both called to mind what may be the second-funniest food-related sit-com scene ever, or possibly tied for first with the Thanksgiving episode of Friends where Rachel makes the trifle, which I referenced a few weeks ago. 

In this classic episode of The Bob Newhart Show, Bob is left behind at Thanksgiving when Emily flies off to a family reunion. Bob, Howard (the dithering airline pilot neighbor), Jerry (the orthodontist office mate) and Mr. Carlin (Bob’s patient) get together for a bachelor Thanksgiving and proceed first to get drunk, and then to attempt to order Chinese food without benefit of a take-out menu. (Of course, not even a menu could have saved these overserved fellows.)  If you recall the episode, I’ve sure you’ve never thought of moo goo gai pan in quite the same way again.

So, imagine how crestfallen Paper Doll was to find that not only is there no YouTubeification of this hysterical scene, but that the Bob Newhart Show episodes on Hulu and Fancast only go up through season 3, and this gem, “Over the River and Through the Woods”, is episode 11 of season 4.  The best I can offer my dear readers is a too-brief excerpt transcribed by Mental Floss Magazine.

While I hate that I cannot link you directly to this transcendent episode, I hope those of you with Netflix or a similar service will take a chance to order delivery of season 4, and get a taste of this masterpiece of Chinese food and humor.

Until then, good luck getting those menus in order.  Hmmm, anyone else feeling a bit peckish?

*With apologies to Jane Austen, whom Paper Doll is certain would have granted forgiveness in return for being able to write in a nice take-away curry or Chicago deep dish delivered directly to Netherfield Park.