Country Cooking
Culture tour of Macau
By Micky Fenix
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 22:58:00 11/19/2008
Filed Under: Food, Lifestyle & Leisure
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WHILE the main object of the seven chefs on a tour in Macau was to eat and learn the cooking, equally important were the other aspects of the culture—the architecture, history, lifestyle and entertainment of the city.
Our first lunch was at the Camoes, a Portuguese restaurant. It’s a short walk from The Rocks Hotel on the Fishermen’s Wharf where we stayed.
We were stuffed with pleasantly cool white wine, perfect olives, appetizers of octopus, fried shrimps and bacalhau croquettes. The duck cooked with rice was what some wished for and it was there. But what I hoped for and got was seafood cooked in a cataplana, a copper clam-like cookware where all the ingredients were steamed with tomatoes to perfection.
Salads
In almost all the places we went to, Filipinos were the top chefs. And so it was at the Camoes and at O Porto Interior where we had Macanese prawns cooked in lots of garlic, crabs and a creamy soup placed inside a huge bread.
We didn’t get to ask if a Filipino chef was still grill master at O Manel Cozinha Portugues, but the owner, Joachim Manuel Peña, was there and led us to our long table dinner at his new extension.
We were served clams with buttery sauce, grilled pork ribs and salad—always present in Portuguese restaurants, leafy greens with onions, cucumber, bell pepper and tomatoes in vinaigrette.
Palate break
Our hosts also realized we needed something different from Macanese and Portuguese chow. We had our wonderful dim sum lunch at the Lua Azul in the tall Macau Tower. And at the Afrikan at the Waterfront, the buffet of grilled items-pork, duck, beef, lamb, seafood was a good break for our palates.
The Macau Museum is a small, intimate view of the place and the people. The more interesting areas displayed domestic scenes of traditional kitchens and dining rooms, bakeries and street vendors, complete with audio recordings of how they called out their wares.
Egg tart
The Macau pastry most of us know is the Portuguese egg tart, and, of those, Lord Stow’s is the most famous. Unfortunately, founder Andrew Stow died two years ago. We met one of two people running his business.
Eileen, Andrew’s sister, welcomed us to the original bakery in Coloane island. She showed us the process from before baking to the final product, then brought us to the café extension so we could enjoy egg tarts with coffee or tea by a garden. (Margaret, Andrew’s wife, runs one of the branches favored by Chinese tourists).
It was at the Wine Museum where we tasted and learned from José Mesquita about Portuguese whites and reds. The best part was the demonstration on how to open sparkling wines and ports without popping the cork.
For the bubbly, it was a saber. For the port, a heated clamp on the neck of the bottle, then a douse of cold water. Both chopped off the upper part of the bottle neck, an unusual way to open the bottle for those of us used to just pushing out the cork.
Rounding off our visit were trips to the casinos. Some of the men favored the old-fashioned Macau casinos, but the ladies opted for the Sands Hotel for its huge chandelier, Wynn for its change-of-season show and the fountain ballet to the music of Debussy’s “Claire de Lune,” and “The Venetian” for the gondola ride—and the Cirque de Soleil show, Zaia. It was two-and-a-half hours of flying objects and people, huge balloons and two crazy clowns.
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