The Biggest Chinese Restaurant in the World
Verzio FF With an official plaque to prove it, The West Lake Restaurant in Changsha, China holds the title of the world's largest restaurant. With a staff of nearly 1000 - including 300 chefs - and 5000 seats, West Lake is a combination mini-theme park and eatery, featuring live entertainment a...
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| Institution: | Open Society Archives at Central European University |
| Language: | Mandarin Chinese |
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Elman, Lawrence
2008
Netherlands |
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| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/10891/osa:6c1561b1-4a87-45f7-b264-9465ee281798 |
| Summary: | Verzio FF
With an official plaque to prove it, The West Lake Restaurant in Changsha, China holds the title of the world's largest restaurant. With a staff of nearly 1000 - including 300 chefs - and 5000 seats, West Lake is a combination mini-theme park and eatery, featuring live entertainment and landscaped pools and pavilions. Overseeing the enterprise is its savvy and energetic owner, Qin Linzi, who uses military efficiency and martial songs to motivate her employees. "Solidarity equals strength, strength is iron, strength is steel," they sing listlessly, while Mrs Qin enthusiastically leads from the front, zealously promulgating her own version of Chinese socialism. Her customers are newly wealthy Chinese busy throwing big budget banquets - a wedding, a parent’s seventieth birthday and a baby’s one month welcome party. Outside the walls of the restaurant we also meet the lower classes who make all of this wealth possible. The girls from poor families with little choice but to work cheap, especially if, as one of the protagonists casually mentions, her father was jailed because she was a second child. The contradictions of this world are plentiful yet glibly accepted by all involved. A fascinating microcosm of contemporary China. |
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| Published: | 2008 |