Made in Macao | Multicultural eating and family dinner

Jenny Lao-Phillips

There is a Chinese saying 「民以食為天」roughly translated as “Food is the first necessity of the people”, that says Macao must be a heaven to many. In almost any populated neighborhood in Macao, it is not hard to find restaurants of different cuisines from all around the world. Not to mention we are one of the few places with our very own cooking technique of Macanese Cuisine, which is listed as intangible cultural heritage.

It may not be surprising to find that many local Chinese cannot distinguish between Macanese food and Portuguese food, but a number of Macanese dishes are indistinguishable from Cantonese dishes as well. The more well-
known dishes like Minchi (minced-beef) and Portuguese Chicken can easily be identified, but there are others which, for almost my whole life, I believed  were Chinese dishes.

Some of these, including a dish named Tamarindus – stewed pork in shrimp paste and sour plum sauce, bitter melon fried shrimp, lean port with beans, and turnip cake, are found in many family styled café-type restaurants where it is hard to distinguish what type of cuisine they serve. In Macau, we consider these Cantonese dishes, but I was told by someone from the Canton Province that they don’t have those dishes in restaurants in China. The same way my first Portuguese friends told me they had never heard of the dish “Portuguese Chicken” in Portugal.

The more I tried to learn about our intangible cultural heritage, the more confused I became about differences between Macanese and Cantonese dishes. But one thing that seems to be common among the Macanese dishes is that they consist of a combination of food cultures from around the world, including flavors like curry and turmeric, and cooking styles from places like Africa, India and Malaysia. I guess one of the reasons it is cultural heritage is its multicultural combination within each dish.

In my opinion, it is not merely the cooking skills and taste of the food that makes Macanese dishes an important part of Macao culture. It is the cooking and sharing of the food. Macanese dishes, despite looking quite simple and unpretentious, are actually not easy to cook right, mostly because the recipes of these dishes are passed on from one generation to another. Even Macanese restaurants are mostly run in a family style, often serving their secret recipe to regular customers as if they were part of the extended family.

This is quite similar to the Chinese culture in Macao. Aside from the similarity in the cooking of some of the dishes, they are often made in large portions and different varieties of food are served in a meal, strongly suggesting they are not made for one or two persons. So, at the center of both cultures, is the family dinner.

Once upon a time, it was considered unthinkable for young people not to go home for dinner. In fact, until a few years ago, I had students, both Chinese and Macanese, telling me they seldom go out for dinner because the whole family had to be home for dinner every day. That explains why some of the best of both cuisines are only served in family-style restaurants.

That said, although Macao is a place of multicultural cuisine where we can easily find Japanese, Korean, Thai, Italian and French restaurants everywhere, these cuisines are more for special occasions and once-in-a-while gatherings. In the end, we tend to choose either mum’s cooking at home or a family-
style small restaurant for regular meals. That also explains why exotic restaurants in Macao do not necessarily last, but the family-styled ones, where it is hard to tell if they are serving Macanese or Cantonese cuisine, survive in the long run.