The Biggest Chinese Restaurant in the World



Sneak Peak of Episode 2: A Good Match

07 November 2009 | 0:00 - By Phil Lees

The West Lake Restaurant is preparing for a huge wedding ceremony. The bridegroom is a wealthy businessman and the bride is a beautiful girl, who was a waitress in the restaurant. She says that money and marriage are co-dependent. The betrothal gifts that her fiancé gave to her family were worth over 180,000 yuan.

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Episode 1: Enterprise

06 November 2009 | 0:00 - By Phil Lees

If there is a fundamental point behind the first episode of The Biggest Chinese Restaurant in the World, it is that West Lake Restaurant is big. Gargantuan, really.


The restaurant contains five kitchens and a capacity to seat 5,000 guests simultaneously in a variety of themed banquet halls and hundreds of private rooms overlooking the ostentatious, traditionally-styled gardens. A quick run through the kitchens documents the thousands of kilos of pork, tonnes of fish, flocks of duck and greens that are poured into the restaurant's gaping maw, not to mention the metres of live snake.

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Sneak Peek of Episode 1: Enterprise

04 November 2009 | 0:00 - By Phil Lees

With a staff of more then 1000 waiting staff and serving up 1000 ducks, 2000kg of rice and 1100kg of chilli each week it is easy to see how this massive eatery has earned its place in the Guinness Book of Records as The Biggest Restaurant in the World, a plaque that hangs proudly on its inner walls.

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About this Blog

This four part documentary series explores the inner workings of the five-thousand-seater West Lake Restaurant in the Chinese city of Changsha.

Phil Lees grew up in rural Victoria, the first generation in his family to not have lived on the farm and thereby not slaughter their own meat.

In 2005 he moved to Cambodia and started the nation’s first food blog, Phnomenon.com, named after the best pun that he has ever made. It turns out that Cambodian food is delicious and unlike the warnings in most guidebooks, is not likely to kill you with any immediacy. Gridskipper called him a “national treasure”. Lonely Planet’s Greater Mekong guide called him “the unofficial pimp of Cambodian cuisine”. The New York Times laughed at a funny hotdog he saw.

Phil makes a mean sausage, a hoppy pale ale, a modest laksa. He owns three barbecues and is in the market for a fourth.

 
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