My big Macanese takeaway
The Macau melting pot may well hold shrimps that are drunken, steamed and sauna-ed, writes
Today’s biggest travel fad is summarised in three words: “like a local.”
Guide books — entire holidays even — are sold on the promise of getting to know a place just by aping the inhabitants. Imagine: the sheer pomposity of arriving in a place expecting to attempt things that have taken a lifetime to practise, and many generations to refine.
In my experience it’s a phrase that always over-promises and under-delivers.
Cycle Holland “like a local”; it’s too much like hard work. Haggle a Marrakesh merchant “like a local”; I have neither the nerve nor the numeracy. Tango Argentino “like a local”; I’ve two left feet, both with an independent sense of rhythm.
But, eat like a local? I’ll try some of that. If there’s one way you can safely digest a culture and its customs, it would be at the dinner table. Nowhere can so much be best learned by eating, and eating so well, than in Macau.
A former Portuguese hub on the South China Sea, these are naturally the predominant tastes you’ll notice first, but there’s far more going on than that.
Macanese cooking is full of seafood and spices, carried on the Iberian trade winds. Angolan chicken mixes with Brazilian stews and servings of Cantonese dumplings. Each dish is layered in with generous helpings of history and distinct flavour as this busy and densely crowded region.
The Macanese like their food fresh. In some cases, still jumping.
On this particular evening by the chapel of St. Francis Xavier in Coloane, Macau’s southernmost tip, it is not only crates of shellfish that could be described as jumping; the whole square is alive.
At a streetside corner table at the Nga Tim cafe, I am in the perfect position to soak up the atmosphere.
The street is hemmed in by tables, full of late-night diners. Hoteliers and croupiers on their way back from working the Taipa casinos navigate their way home between them. A woman is trying to take her dogs for a stroll as children throw firecrackers at one another. The whole thing is a fantastic cacophony.
When the cafe’s owner, Mr Wong, arrives, singing, at our table, I half expect him to doff his cap and ask for tips, having seen him stop and serenade a table just down from ours.
Then again, if I owned a restaurant as good and as busy his, I’d be singing in the streets as well.
With an imperious, grey moustache and what looked like a beige fishing vest, Mr Wong mixes through the crowds like the occupants of the fish tanks in the restaurant windows.
Reappearing from the kitchen he returns with the signature dish — a speciality as theatrical as restaurant’s moustachioed owner: “Drunken, steamed, sauna shrimps.”
I peer into the bowl and there they are: huge, fleshy prawns bobbing around in a sauce of stupefyingly sweet, spiced rice wine. They aren’t left to contemplate their situation for long before being steamed alive over bed of hot rocks. The whole bowl was dispatched in a billowing, aromatic cloud of steam.
Poof! Hey presto: the most tender and fresh prawns you will ever eat.
Mr Wong doesn’t take much encouragement to break into a rendition of a Cantonese operetta.
We tuck into our pudding of Portuguese tarts under the peeling, custard yellow walls of the chapel.
The cooking, the hacienda-like courtyard where we are sitting, even our host’s musical taste is medley of influences. So much of Macau is a mishmash with no one, definitive translation.
Even in the past 20 years, it has continued to adapt to new influences. The country has seen a lot of change since it was returned to the rule of mainland China. Most obvious are the super casinos which have sprung up. As each new mega structure opens — equipped with flagship restaurants and imported celebrity chefs, with new ideas and new cuisines — there is no worry about their influence on the food or culture.
Macau still has plenty of room for more.