Britain's Largest Restaurant, Za Za Bazaar, Plans 2,000 Dinners a Night

Za Za Bazaar, now officially Britain's largest restaurant, opened its doors on Tuesday, in Bristol, with promise of more than 2,000 dinners a night. The restaurant, which is the brainchild of Nitin Bhatnagar, an internationally renowned chef, hopes, according to The Sun, to serve over a ton of rice and about 5,000 chickens every week.

The 30,000 sq. ft harbor-side restaurant can sit approximately 1,000 customers at a time and offers two seating every night. The flipside of so expansive an operation, however, is that there can be as many as 8,000 dirty dishes to wash on busy weekends, meaning that the 120-strong staff has its work cut out.

The restaurant chain plans to have eight branches across the country and will look to create as many as 1,000 new jobs over the next 18 months.

The Bristol set-up has been designed to re-create the ambience of the street markets of the Far East. However, in an effort to keep itself global, it serves food from all over the world.

A team of 36 chefs and eight porters cook and serve a wide variety of cuisines, ranging from Chinese to Indian and Tex-Mex to pastas, pizzas and traditional British dishes.

"The vibe is the buzz of the night market. If you go to Bangkok or Singapore, you will find night markets with people selling delicious things, vying for your business, trying to get you to taste their food," said Bhatnagar.

The restaurant has been built on the site of a former nightclub and took three months to complete. The cost of the project has been estimated at over £3million.

Incidentally, the previous holder of the record for being the country's largest restaurant was Cosmo, in Croydon, South London, which could serve 800 people at a time.