A restaurant in China is charging nearly one hundred yuan for a meal of eight dumplings, sparking one of several recent debates over exorbitant prices for ordinary goods.
The controversy began with a Jan 29 microblog post by film director, Zhang Zhou. “Eating Goubuli dumplings in Tianjin,” Zhang wrote on his Sina Weibo account, “eight small dumplings for a hundred yuan.”
Goubuli is one of the oldest and most well-known restaurants in Tianjin, a major port city in northeast China. Steamed dumplings, or baozi, are the restaurant’s signature dish.
Zhang’s post also included a photo of a portion of Goubuli’s menu. The photo showed a dish of eight pork dumplings for 96 yuan (US $15), as well as a dish of shrimp dumplings for 128 yuan ($20).
Despite the high prices and the restaurant’s fame, Zhang commented: “They taste just like you’d buy off the street, and the atmosphere is about average.”
The post quickly became one of the most talked about topics on China’s microblogs, with many netizens expressing outrage at the high prices. One post charged that Goubuli was taking advantage of visiting tourists, “just like the hotels at Sanya,” referring to China’s most famous beachside resort.
But others sided with the restaurant, saying that high prices were justified by the restaurant’s status as an historic Tianjin landmark.
In an interview with China National Radio, Goubuli’s manager explained that the controversial dumplings did not represent the restaurant’s overall pricing. The 96 yuan dumplings were a specialty item, with fillings that included Kobe beef.
He added that Goubuli also offered a dish of eight pork dumplings for 36 yuan, and said that customers were free to choose a meal that fit within their means.
Zhang Zhou later admitted that he had never actually eaten at Goubuli, and said that the photo had been taken by a friend, who had complained to him about the prices.
Less than a week after Zhang’s post, a similar controversy was sparked by a photo of a carton of cigarettes priced at 10,000 yuan ($1,587). The photo, posted by another Weibo user, shows a gold-colored carton of Yellow Crane Tower brand cigarettes on sale at an airport in Hubei province.
The packaging notes that the cigarettes are a special edition commemorating the 100th anniversary of Tsinghua University. The prestigious Beijing university celebrated its centenary in April of 2011.
Both Tsinghua and the Wuhan Cigarette Factory, which produces Yellow Crane Tower cigarettes, said that no such commemorative cigarettes had been produced, and that the carton in the photo was a counterfeit product.
