Spring Festival Dining: Queues of 3,000; going to war!

Unsurprisingly in the first Spring Festival in four years that hasn’t been impacted by Covid, the hospitality sector had a big New Year. Data from the Ministry of Commerce reveals that the first five days of the Spring Festival holiday saw nationwide orders for dine-in set meals increase by 161%, with a corresponding 186% year-on-year growth in orders contributed by out-of-town consumers.

During the Spring Festival, Chengdu's Wanghoutang Hotpot saw their daily queue numbers surpassing 3,000, with 71 tables turning over 10 times in a day. One store manager candidly expressed the overwhelming influx of customers during the Festival on social media, stating, "This doesn't feel like a festival, it feels like a battle!"

A large crowd gathers outside the hotpot restaurant, with piles of queueing numbers stacked like mountains. Source: 36kr

Beijing's renowned Nandamen Hotpot witnessed daily queue numbers exceeding 1,000 tables, leaving one customer exclaiming, "On the sixth day of the lunar new year, at 1pm, there were still 700 tables waiting in line. I waited for four hours but still couldn't get a seat!"

One RED user said she was in line at Nandamen Hotpot when she was told there were 1,000 tables ahead of her. Image from @shirley on RED

Another restaurant, "Ouji food stall" in Jiangxi's Jingdezhen, also experienced a continuous surge in queue numbers from the first to the sixth day of the festival, with daily queue numbers approaching 700.

There were many more examples across China of really, really long queues. Not great for diners, but nice that concerns of the pandemic keeping people indoors seems well and truly behind us in China now!