File:Chin's Islander Lounge ghost sign, Main Street, Buffalo, New York - 20220915.jpg

English: As seen in September 2022: the ghost sign on the south side wall of the commercial building at 888 Main Street in Buffalo, New York is the last vestige of the miniature hospitality empire founded in 1933 by pioneering Chinese-American entrepreneur T. Y. Chin. Chin's Chow Mein was not the earliest Chinese restaurant in Buffalo, but - undoubtedly due to its location on tony Delaware Avenue - it was indeed among the first to successfully market itself outside Buffalo's small, tight-knit, Near East Side-based Chinese immigrant community. Or, to put it in the words of Chin himself in an interview with the Buffalo Evening News, it was now "no longer a necessity to go to dimly lighted places and wait patiently and pay heavily for Chinese food". Indeed, Chin's had "specialized in take-out orders" from the start: newspaper ads from its earliest years of operation touted that its menu of noodle bowls and stir-fried vegetable platters were available "to take home, hot [and] ready to serve" until 1 AM nightly, for a "small delivery charge", offering "relief from cooking over a hot stove" - a novelty at the time. They even had success marketing chow mein as a health food, with the endorsement of leading dietitians and a bustling side business supplying food to cafeterias in numerous schools, hospitals, and other institutions around the local area. Throughout the 1930s and '40s, Chin's empire expanded steadily: aside from the noodle shop, the building across the street soon became home to Chin's Red Dragon, offering more elaborate lunches and dinners as well as a smart cocktail bar and nightly entertainment, while 1945 saw the opening of Chin's Pagoda, a swanky nightspot in the heart of the downtown Theater District. Additional Chin's Chow Mein locations also opened in New York City, Cleveland, and elsewhere. However, the ghost sign itself dates from a later iteration of the business: a mid-1960s renovation saw the noodle shop transformed into Chin's Islander Lounge, a tiki bar that offered a menu of "Polynesian and Cantonese foods" (hence the palm tree and pineapple imagery still faintly visible on the left side of the sign) and whimsical tropical-themed drinks until its closure sometime in the mid- or late 1980s. The building has remained a restaurant since then, with a revolving door of tenants the current one of which is Coco, a French bistro which lately has been specializing in crêpes; their "Crêpe Chalet" is visible at bottom left.