Asian Cuisine Festival in Beijing ends but shows great appetite

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The Asian Cuisine Festival ended successfully in Beijing on May 22, with its main venue in Beijing Olympic Park attracting nearly 80,000 visitors in seven days.

To celebrate the Conference on Dialogue of Asian Civilizations (CDAC), Beijing, along with Guangzhou, Hangzhou and Chengdu, present their citizens with the diversity of Asian delicacies.

In the Beijing Olympic Park, food stalls from Chinese time-honored brands to India's roti prata and Japan's washoku, were set up for visitors to have a taste, raking in a total of 2.2 million yuan (320,000 U.S. dollars).

Unmanned restaurants and robot delivery were also displayed at the exhibition to showcase how technology has changed the traditional catering industry.

A robot delivers food at an exhibition area in Beijing Olympic Park during the Asian Cuisine Festival, May 19, 2019. /VCG Photo

A total of 282 restaurants in six business districts at Beijing's main urban areas joined the festival as well, achieving accumulated sales of 38.3 million yuan, an increase of 9.1 percent compared with the same period last year.

As discounts were offered both offline and online, the number of visits to and ordering on online restaurants participating in the festival totaled 922,000 and 427,000 respectively, having the online trading volume reach 7.5 million yuan, an increase of 16.4 percent compared with last year.

Taking food as the medium, the Asian Cuisine Festival shows how food from different civilizations coexist and commonly develop.

A group of people show their unique food culture at an exhibition area in Beijing Olympic Park during the Asian Cuisine Festival, May 16, 2019. /VCG Photo

According to statistics from Meituan-Dianping, the China's leading online and on-demand delivery platform, the number of Asian restaurants opening on the Chinese mainland has continued to grow, with an annual growth rate of over 50 percent.

The data shows that among these Asian restaurants, Japanese cuisine restaurants account for the largest proportion with 53 percent of the total, followed by Korean cuisine restaurants accounting for 36.4 percent and Southeast Asian cuisine restaurants with 7.5 percent.

Although the number of restaurants for cuisine from South Asian, West Asian, Central Asian and other regions in Asia is relatively small so far, it's growing quickly. Take Indian cuisine as an example: the number of restaurants increased seven times from 2014 to 2018.

(Top image: A chef makes an Indian roti prata at a food stall in Beijing Olympic Park during the Asian Cuisine Festival, May 16, 2019. /VCG Photo)