The Unthinkable

Read Michael Wilson's story: Three crumpled dollars and two quarters, tugged from the pocket of a puffy coat on a cold night, brings four hot chicken wings with French fries or fried rice. The most expensive dish on the restaurant's menu is No. 71, the lobster meat chow mein, at $8.95 a quart.

The Happy House Chinese takeout restaurant in Bedford-Stuyvesant does not feed the rich, or put on airs, and maybe that is why, in the seven years it has fed its busy and occasionally even violent corner of Malcolm X Boulevard, it was never robbed. Maybe the thought simply never occurred to anyone. It would be like holding up one's own kitchen.

That all changed, twice, in recent weeks, in two vicious attacks on the restaurant's workers, two botched robberies that caused serious injury and yielded no cash.