More than 500 gourmets were in Chengdu, the capital of Southwest China's Sichuan Province yesterday at the opening ceremony of the International Foods and Tour Festival of China.

The eight-day festival will allow hungry participants to sample traditional Sichuan food, snacks and hotpot at 22 venues across the city.

The city has built more than 40 kitchens in the festival's main venue, the Chengdu Panda Mall, at a cost of 20 million yuan (US$2.4 million).

There are around 50 famous Chinese restaurants at the mall, serving food and snacks, according to the festival's organizing committee.

A seminar on the catering economy in the 21st century will be held at the festival, which is jointly organized by the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade and the Chengdu municipal government.

Chefs and gourmets representing different styles of Chinese, French and Japanese cuisine and managers from world-famous restaurants will take part.

The southwestern city is synonymous with spicy food and over 200 different types of snacks.

Chengdu is hosting the food fair because it wants to be known as China's leading food city and is aiming to build the catering sector into one of its pillar industries.

And it is on the way to reaching these goals, as according to figures from the Chengdu Trade and Grain Bureau, the city's catering industry has been expanding at an annual rate of more than 10 percent over the past decade.

In the first half of this year, the industry's retail sales were 8.4 billion yuan (US$1 billion), up 15 percent year-on-year, coming behind Guangzhou, Shanghai and Beijing.

Local people's rising living standards, the development of the city's tourist sector and its convention and exhibition economy have accounted for this sharp increase in the retail sales of the catering industry, said He Huazhang, vice-mayor of Chengdu.

The vice-mayor estimated that more than 100,000 gourmets will visit Chengdu during the week-long festival.

Chengdu will spend five years developing three to five chain restaurants whose annual business turnover is expected to reach 500 million to 800 million yuan (US$60 million to US$100 million) in a bid to grow the sector, the vice-mayor said.

(China Daily October 27, 2004)