TIFF Review: THE BIGGEST CHINESE RESTAURANT IN THE WORLD
Five thousand seats. One thousand staff. Inspirational singing to start off the work day. The West Lake Restaurant in Changsha is not just the biggest Chinese Restaurant in the world, it is the biggest restaurant in the world, period. Guinness certified. The world behind the scenes of West Lake is the nominal subject of The Biggest Chinese Restaurant in the World, and a fascinating world it is, but by the time the final frame rolls you'll find it has just as much to say about the changing economic realities of China and the growing gap between the haves and have nots. And, also, it'll give PETA rather a lot to fume about.
The West Lake is the creation of Qin Linzi, a forty-something divorcee who grew up hard only to become a fiercely driven business woman, a prime example of China's new economic elite. Her restaurant is a virtual world unto itself, capable of seating up to five thousand diners simultaneously thanks to its eight hundred seat primary dining room, a hundred private rooms, five separate kitchens, a massive staff - many of whom are housed on site - and a crew of dancers and live entertainers to keep diners amused while eating. In Qin's words the Chinese have come through decades of eating to simply fill their stomachs and now that the economy is growing they are now able to also eat for pleasure and she's here to be sure that they do.
The film shines a light into several fascinating worlds. You not only get an inside look at what it takes to run a business of this size and the mind boggling logistics of feeding mass amounts of people simultaneously on cue but also at the people who make the whole enterprise go. We speak to managers and servers, cooks and farmers down the supply line. We hear from poor rural girls forced to work to provide for their families and those approaching the job purely to feed their own ambitions. The restaurant itself is a microcosm of China itself and a fascinating one at that.
But we also get outside the restaurant's walls to meet several of it's key customers, newly wealthy Chinese throwing big budget banquets - a wedding, a parent's seventieth birthday and a baby's one month welcome party. The scale is stunning, the need to impress over riding. Here in the west we're used to hearing about China purely as a communist country and have all sorts of images attached to what that means but as the young bride states before her wedding, this new nation is overwhelmingly materialistic, money makes it go. Sure, the nation is still communist, and the head of the restaurant a card carrying member of the party, but the distribution of wealth is a forgotten element of party doctrine, apparently, and those who have are eager to have more and let people know they have it.
Also outside the walls of the restaurant we meet the lower classes who make all of this wealth possible. The girls from poor families with little choice but to work cheap, the girl who states casually that her father was jailed because she was a second child. Her mother, she tells us, was the one supposed to be imprisoned but her father went instead because mom was still breastfeeding. The contradictions of this world are plentiful and obvious and that they are so glibly accepted by all involved is fascinating.
The Biggest Chinese Restaurant int he World is a fine example of what documentary film can be. It is fascinating, deeply entertaining, and shows us here in the west a picture of a rising global power that we have never seen before. It's a crowd pleaser with brains and heart and it's hard to argue with that.
