Photo Essay: For China’s Consumers, Eating Out Is Back on the Menu

It is Jan. 27, the last day of the Lunar New Year holiday. The entrance to a rice noodle restaurant in the southwestern city of Kunming is packed with tourists’ suitcases and baby carriers. Queues of diners fill the corridor. Inside the restaurant, steaming rice noodles sizzling in porcelain bowls are being served to customers.

The waiters have been on the trot serving lunch up to 4 p.m., but all the effort was worth it. More than 1,000 bowls of rice noodles were sold and the single-day revenue exceeded 70,000 yuan ($10,216), setting a new pre-pandemic record.