Way back in the ’60s, those with entry-level salaries, including me, had our own Great Good Place in New York‘s Chinatown. Lin’s Garden offered the best Big Apple Cantonese — fried-duck won ton soup and beef-with-black-bean-sauce kind of stuff — I‘ve ever had. All for upward of 85 cents per magnanimous portion. The stuff was so good and cheap, it didn’t pay to cook.Lin‘s overlord, a pleasant young tyrant we called Bill, made his low-budget operation — half a block off the Bowery — pay by filling every seat, stuffing his customers together like dolmas in a can. You never chose whom you sat with at those long Formica tables, which the help would slosh clean with hot tea. Sometimes you saw your rice going onto a stranger’s plate. Sometimes you chopsticked a brown-sauced sea snail from an inattentive neighbor. No one much minded.