Less than 100 hours before its opening party, China Live was almost as busy as a football stadium 10 minutes before kickoff.

Inside George Chen and Cindy Wong-Chen’s 30,000-square-foot Chinatown restaurant and market complex, armies of workers painted walls, sliced lengths of wood and picked their way among the nests of wires. Servers-in-training swarmed from kitchen station to kitchen station as managers described the dishes each would produce. Cooks seasoned their pans and hoisted jars of imported Sichuan peppercorns up to the shelves above the wok line.

The country, let alone San Francisco Chinatown, has never seen a Chinese food emporium of China Live’s scope and lavishness. The complex was inspired by Eataly, an Italian culinary wonderland whose first U.S. location, a 50,000-square-foot market with almost a dozen restaurants and food stands inside, opened in New York in 2010.

Construction willing, the first floor of the 644 Broadway complex, which occupies half of its total footprint, is set to open Wednesday. That will include Oolong Cafe, which specializes in Chinese and Taiwanese teas, as well as a retail market selling foodstuffs and tableware, and Marketplace Restaurant, a sprawling, casual restaurant that will serve dishes from all over China and Taiwan prepared with what Chen calls “our modern China Live twist, being in San Francisco.”

The remaining components will unfurl over the coming months. Later this spring, the second floor, whose interior walls are still skeletal, is projected to open, with a bar, a cocktail lounge and Eight Tables, a haute-cuisine restaurant that Chen hopes will rival four-star restaurants such as Benu and Saison. Afterward comes the banquet room on the third floor. Dreams of a rooftop bar and omakase sushi station remain unformed.

The success of Eataly, along with Chen’s own charisma, may have inspired backers from a Singaporean hospitality company to fund China Live. Chen won’t say how much he has spent so far, only that it’s north of $20 million.

Some have seen China Live, along with the 2016 opening of the Michelin-starred Mister Jiu’s, as signs of a gentrifying Chinatown. “I think that on the Broadway corridor, it’s got a long way to come before it’s gentrified,” said Aaron Peskin, who represents the neighborhood on the Board of Supervisors. “I think (China Live) is going to be a boon to Chinatown and North Beach, and I’m pleased and excited.”

To call China Live ambitious is to underestimate its founder’s dreams. “I don’t want to be grandiose about it,” George Chen said, “but I want to educate the public on what real Chinese cuisine is.”

On a tour through the first floor, Chen pointed out more details than one man should be able to carry within one head: A giant urn-like cauldron for double-boiling soups. A dessert station to produce both pastries and Taiwanese shaved ice. Duck ovens and steamer stations. Cooks from Shanghai who will send out batches of pan-fried soup dumplings every 20 minutes.

As part of Chen’s educational mission, a chunk of the menu will change every day. “We’ve been in Chinatown for three years now,” he said. “The vibrancy of the markets next to us is remarkable, with people shopping every morning and buying the freshest things. People don’t realize that’s not reflected in the Chinese restaurants here.”

China Live’s team of chefs is led by Robin Lin, who just arrived from Taipei, as well as a few names that will be known to local restaurant watchers: culinary director of operations Joey Altman, sous chef Jonnatan Leiva, pastry chef Luis Villavelazquez and director of beverage Duggan McDonald. Other kitchen staff have come from Koi Palace and Hong Kong Flower Lounge.

All are there to execute a singular, quixotic vision.

Who curated the 1,000 spices, condiments and ceramics to be sold in the marketplace? George and Cindy Chen. Who negotiated with farmers to supply China Live’s proprietary teas? George Chen. Who designed plates for the complex’s high-end restaurant and teapots for its Oolong Cafe? George Chen. Who has taken the title of China Live’s executive chef? The same.

Chen emigrated from Taiwan to California as a teenager, and the restaurant work that paid for his university studies eventually became his career of choice. By his estimation, he has opened 16 restaurants in the United States and China, 11 of them with Cindy. Locally, he is best known for Shanghai 1930 and Betelnut. The latter ran for 21 years before closing in 2015.

Chen says the concepts for both Marketplace and Eight Tables have tumbled over and over in his brain for years now. He didn’t know which one to focus on, until Eataly opened and Chen realized that he could house both restaurants in the same building — along with much, much more.

Construction began in 2013. The Chens soon took over a building next door. Well-known restaurant group AvroKO, responsible for RN74 and Napa’s shuttered Ninebark, designed the first two floors, incorporating hand-painted tiles, carved wood shelving and sculpted river rocks from China to accent bright white walls and poured-concrete floors.

Chen says he hopes to draw people from all over the Bay Area, not to mention tourists and Chinatown residents.

“For the locals, it’s going to be overpriced,” said Steven Lee, a small-business advocate who helped reopen Sam Wo last year, “but it does give people from other neighborhoods an opportunity to come back to Chinatown like in the 1940s and 1950s. There’s high hopes from some of our more professional people who want to revitalize Chinatown at night.”

“Rediscovering Chinatown was one of the big things about coming here,” Chen said of finding the Broadway location, which last housed Gold Mountain restaurant. “I thought it was a perfect place.”

Jonathan Kauffman is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jkauffman@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jonkauffman