Posts tagged ‘Mount Everest’

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14/12/2016

Pop-Up Restaurant at Everest Base Camp Aims for Peak of Fine Dining – India Real Time – WSJ

Chefs are trekking thousands of feet to prepare fancy food in the cold

Trekkers pass through a glacier at the Mount Everest base camp, Nepal.

The peaks of fine dining just keep getting higher and higher.

A caravan of roving chefs and their 15 guests is currently making its way up the Himalayas toward the base camp at Mount Everest, where, 17,500 feet above sea level and amid the lashing winds and bone-penetrating chill of the Nepalese winter, food will be served.

The One Star House Party, as the project has been dubbed, is preparing 16 more such destination dining experiences, one a month, through 2018, though not all of the destinations are so extreme. Among the chefs involved is James Sharman, a onetime chef de partie at Noma, the influential, soon-to-close restaurant that put Copenhagen on the global culinary map.

The Nepal journey is costing its participants $1,050 each. Down jackets and sleeping bags are included. The group didn’t immediately respond to a request for the menu.

Everest Base Camp is, literally, a trek. Not a quick one, either. The group first flew from Nepal’s capital of Kathmandu to the tiny airstrip at Lukla, undertaking one of the most treacherous landings on the planet. From there they are walking, helped by porters, who are presumably carrying more than the usual amount of kitchen gear on their backs. Most travelers are advised to spend more than a week making their way up to base camp, to allow their bodies to adjust to the altitude.

On the way, the chefs have been collecting local flora for their mountaintop pantry.

Everest Base Camp is no stranger to haute cuisine. Adventurers scaling the great mountain with some of the more full-service expedition companies can enjoy sushi, pork chops and Peking duck alongside their protein bars and instant noodles. A few years ago Glenfiddich sponsored a whiskey tasting there, billed as the world’s highest, that was broadcast live online.

For more earthbound eaters in South Asia, there will be at least one more chance to join the One Star House Party. Their next destination, slated for January, is Mumbai. Reservations aren’t yet being taken.

Source: Pop-Up Restaurant at Everest Base Camp Aims for Peak of Fine Dining – India Real Time – WSJ

Posted in India alert, Social & cultural | 3 Comments »

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12/11/2013

China in numbers: secondhand view with salutary warning | The Times

3,000km . . . is the combined length of bargain-price underpants (if laid end-to-end) sold on Chinese websites between midnight on Sunday and 1am on Monday morning. If all the cut-price bras sold in the same period were piled on top of one another, the resulting pillar of lingerie would be three times the height of Mount Everest.

In those first, financially incontinent 60 minutes of Monday morning, China’s largest handler of online payments took 25 million orders with a combined value of 6.7 billion yuan (£686 million). About 340,000 of those orders were placed in the first minute. It was as if the world were about to end and China suddenly decided that the only hope of salvation lay in half-price knickers.

Astounding numbers of this sort were in plentiful supply on Monday as China delighted in the mad calculus of consumerism. It looks heartily encouraging, but appearances are deceptive. The cause of the online shopping frenzy was a deluge of sales promotions timed to coincide with “Singles Day” — a magnificently contrived “festival” prompted by the date 11.11. The whole thing was invented only four years ago.

Every online retailer in China (and there are an awful lot of them) was slashing prices as part of the fun. By mid-afternoon of Singles Day, the Alibaba online portal said that its sales promotions had generated more than ten billion yuan. That is already more than total online sales in the United States last year on “Black Friday”, the shopping day that follows Thanksgiving and historically is the biggest day for retail in the American calendar.

The temptation is to treat Singles Day as a bellwether, both of the general strength of online retail and of the ability of China’s nascent consumer economy to concoct its own events from thin air and convince people the best way of celebrating them is by shopping.

The reality, though, is less cut and dried. Taobao, the online shopping mall that enjoyed such fantastic sales on Monday, has another internet retail division that is telling a rather different story. For some months now, various courts in China have created online stores on Taobao to conduct what they call “judicial auctions” — sales of the various goods seized by the courts in criminal cases. The Government’s crackdown on corruption, now almost a year old, has swollen the items seized very significantly.

The auction site for the city of Wenzhou alone runs to more than 100 pages of items, including large vintage wine collections, mobile phones, office buildings, wedding rings, watches and even buses. Overwhelmingly, though, the items under the hammer are residential property, mostly medium to high-end flats. Activity in Wenzhou has always been seen as a weather vane for Chinese property prices and the signals are not encouraging.

The flats go on sale on the judicial auction sites with an estimated reserve price and, because the courts want a sale, that price tends to be at a decent discount to the prevailing market price. An additional appeal is that there is also no commission charged.

Yet many do not make the reserve price. Out of a batch of 157 auctions conducted by the Luchent District Court in Wenzhou, 72 fell through because there was no bid at all. Local property agents are starting to get very twitchy over what Taobao is telling them about the secondhand market.

Discounts may work for underpants, but they do not appear to do so for second-hand property. Chinese are still buying newly built apartments with gusto, on the assumption that eventually the resale market will be robust: the auctions seem to be sounding an alarm over that assumption.

via China in numbers: secondhand view with salutary warning | The Times.

Posted in Affluence, China alert, corruption, Economics, online sales, real estate | Leave a Comment »

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