China Countdown: Supersize My Restaurant

At work so I can't watch the video, but what exactly is the purpose behind having a restaurant that sees 5K customers a day? It seems to me that the pleasure of having a restaurant (based solely on watching various Anthony Bourdain and Gordon Ramsey productions) is to be able to prepare food you love--or at least oversee other people preparing it--and serving it to discerning customers. In such a giant restaurant, those pleasures are lost.

The more I see and hear about China, the more it seems to be about whose X is bigger, restaurant or otherwise.

@LuLu: I know what you mean about the "big X"'s. What I don't understand is how communism, an ideology that's about egalitarian equality, fits with such rigorous, almost unmerciful competition (the rising, raging capitalist influences). Probably the wrong place for this discussion/some learned person to enlighten me, but I still wonder. I know I'm ignorant of Chinese culture, but I don't see how you could stand the kind of pressure that seems to come from constantly pushing one's self to be the absolute very best (instead of "top tier" etc).

Hopefully the Olympics will be quite illuminating.

(The trailer looked intriguing; if the series shows up on the internet I might give it a view)

@Lulu, that is true of "chefs" who see food as art. For a capitalist wanting to turn a buck, selling decent food to as many people who will buy it is the name of the game.

@Keith: I would add that--however much they genuinely love food--even chefs who see food as art are often instinctively brilliant at turning a buck. There's a great passage in the book Heat, about Mario Batali, in which Batali berates workers in his kitchen for throwing away vegetable scraps that could somehow be used. "We don't make money by throwing food away. We make money by buying food, preparing it and reselling it at a profit"--or something to that effect.

In America, I guess, the celeb chef thing is not too open the biggest restaurant but (a la Batali, Jean-Georges, Emeril, Charlie Trotter) to open the most of them.

I as well have trouble "pegging" China, ideologically. For example, I did some traveling in Peru awhile back, and Chinese corporations had a major hold down there. Folks had been really excited when China bought out factories/mines/etc, because China is a "communist" country and there was a general sense that that working conditions would surely improve under Chinese control. And the atrocities and human rights abuses only worsened. The stories of workers struggles for human/civil rights in Peru since then are absolutely heartbreaking.

I read an interesting article ("China's Me Generation" from Time, about a year ago), on young people and China and economics and culture and "stuff": http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1647228,00.html

It was pretty interesting reading.

Shara and Lulu this: http://www.newsweek.com/id/150460
was in my rss reader today and talks about modern china a bit, i know they're a competitor James, but Zakaria is the voice i go to on international issues

There's a five part series on China on Current TV airing a new part each day this week. I have gotten sucked into Current TV recently and find their news coverage to be generally pretty good.

P.S. Here's the link to the show online: http://current.com/topics/88822459_naked_china

Current TV puts pretty much all of its content online as well.