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This article focuses on the experience of foreign restaurant managers who operated a venue integrated to national pavilions at the Shanghai World Expo in 2010. It highlights the specific practicalities of managing in a restaurant in the context of an international event of exceptional scale (the first universal exhibition ever held in China) where the whole range of activities of restaurateurs was constantly subjected to a hefty framework of regulations, controls, and daily inspections. In the backstage kitchens of this cosmopolitan utopia made in China, one unveils a social space rife with tensions, controversies, frustrations, uncertainties, and tough negotiations that interspersed the daily life of this vast laboratory of globalization.