‘Largest gathering of chefs’ in Malaysia? Guinness World Records says no

KUALA LUMPUR — An event held at the Dataran Putrajaya on March 26 claimed to have won the Guinness World Records award for the “largest gathering of chefs”, and the image of the supposed certificate of accomplishment was even shared by Federal Territories Minister Adnan Tengku Mansor on Twitter.

The certificate was supposedly awarded to the iCHEF 2017 event which drew the participation of 4,235 chefs to the event, media reported on Tuesday (March 28).

But Twitter users were not entirely convinced, as the certificate did not look genuine and contained several grammatical errors.

One user, @amrlrxrshd shared an image of the certificate Tengku Adnan had tweeted with the official Guinness World Records (@GWR) official account to ask them if it was authentic.

Their response was: “Unfortunately, that’s not a genuine certificate issued by our records team”.

The iCHEF 2017 organiser, Finemen (M) Holdings Sdn Bhd has since claimed that the entire issue was due to a “misunderstanding” during the announcement on the “Guinness World Record achievement” at the event, NST reported.

They also admitted that the certificate was not actually from Guinness World Records, and was used purely as a gimmick for the announcement.

Finemen Holdings managing director Hakim Omar reportedly said that the misunderstanding occurred when the representative from the Guinness World Records was unable to attend the event.

“The Guinness World Record representative had said that if the Malaysia Book of Records (MBOR) has confirmed that the event was indeed the largest of its kind, then the event organiser could make an announcement on Guinness World Records’ behalf,” he was quoted saying.

Hakim reportedly said that MBOR had verified on March 26 that the gathering was the largest of its kind.

This, he said, surpassed the previous Guinness World Record of 3,634 set at the Consejo Nacional de Cultura Gastronomica (Mexico) at Paseo de la Reforma, Mexico City on March 17, 2014.

“However, a technical error occurred when the organiser prepared a replica Guinness World Record certificate as an announcement gimmick, and not the actual certificate,” Hakim added. MALAY MAIL ONLINE