Seven of Fourteen Main Courses Were Wrong at This Nanchang Wedding Banquet
A father paid about 65,000 yuan for 26 tables at 2,599 yuan apiece, and the hotel served an outdated menu: grouper swapped for bass, roast goose for duck, the lobster downgraded, at every table. The hotel has offered 20,000 yuan; the father wants half the bill back and is going to court.
A father in Nanchang booked a wedding banquet at 2,599 yuan a table — a high-end package by the local standard — and paid a 10,000 yuan deposit in February, six months before his son's October 3 wedding. The final payment brought the bill to about 65,000 yuan. The day after the dinner, relatives began calling: the food had not matched the menu.
Mr. Hu, the groom's father, checked the printed menu the family had confirmed with the hotel and counted seven wrong dishes out of fourteen main courses, at all 26 tables.
The substitutions ran one way, from expensive to cheaper. Grouper arrived as a lower-priced bass; the rack of lamb came out as braised lamb; Cantonese roast goose turned up tea-smoked duck; the short ribs were a different cut entirely; and the imported lobster the menu promised was a Boston lobster on the plate. Even the two staples changed — potstickers and ciba rice cakes became pork buns and egg tarts. A news frame from the family's interview shows the kind of table guests were seated at; the on-screen text reads "Hotel: wrong menu version ordered, willing to compensate 20,000 yuan."
"My friends and relatives all said the banquet was poor, that the dishes were bad," Hu told reporters. "My in-laws told my son it looked like the dishes had been swapped. It made me lose a lot of face."
The hotel's explanation has the virtue of being specific: it keeps two versions of its 2,599-yuan menu, old and new, and the salesperson, it says, submitted the order from the outdated one, which differs in six or seven dishes. A manager surnamed Tang confirmed the mistake, said the hotel had held internal meetings, and raised its compensation offer to 20,000 yuan — just under a third of the bill. Hu wants half the money back, says the amount is not the point, and has told media he will sue. "A wedding is a once-in-a-lifetime occasion," as one widely shared comment put it. "It cannot survive this kind of carelessness."
That, more than the money, is what kept the story on the trending boards into a second day. A wedding banquet in China is a public accounting: the guest list is a map of the two families' obligations, and the printed menu — the exact dishes, at the exact price — is the contract of face between host and guests. Guests photograph the tables. Skipping courses at 26 tables means several hundred people watched a family fail to deliver, which is why the story's emotional center is not fraud or even money but the morning-after phone calls.
The debate in the comments ran to a darker suspicion: "Were they doing this before, and guests just never noticed?" Others asked whether any wedding couple could ever be made whole — no refund restores the meal. The hotel, for now, calls it a work error and has raised its offer twice.
The story crossed platforms fast: No. 16 on Baidu's hot search, with the hotel's "wrong menu version" defense its own entry, and coverage as far as Hong Kong's HK01, which noted the swaps — grouper for bass, lamb for stew, Cuban lobster for Boston — in Cantonese. Whoever wins in court, the banquet center has lost the thing the deposit was actually buying.