We walk into a mom-and-pop restaurant in Rotunda de Carlos da Maia, also known as the Three Lamps District in Macao. Regulars are busy eating their stinky tofu and meat jerky. Pablo Naranjo Agular slides into a seat and orders noodle soup with pig brain. “Are you having it for the first time?” the server asks. He nods, in excitement. “Suggest you have it with a side of intestines too,” she adds. The half-Hungarian and half-Colombian chef, who made Mumbai his home for three years and worked at Le 15 Café in Colaba with his best friend Pooja Dhingra, hung up his apron in July to eat across Asia. Agular left home, Bogota, at the age of 18 for Paris where he worked for Michelin-starred restaurants including Guy Savoy, Alain Senderens and Ze Kitchen Galerie. He then set up three of his own. “Mumbai happened when I was facing the lowest moments of my life. I had lost my business and broken up with my girlfriend,” says Agular, picking up a string of noodles from the bowl with a pair of wooden chopsticks. The pig brain easily gives in to the pressure of his spoon and he takes a bite. “It’s nice, it has a creamy texture like an egg yolk,” he smiles.
Fusion cuisine
In 2017, Macao earned the title of ‘UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy’ with the casino city offering the best of the world cuisines, it also nourishes probably one of world’s first fusion cuisines – Macanese. When the Portuguese entered Macao, they brought their olives and spices from India and Africa, and used Chinese ingredients to make Portuguese dishes. At Sands Resorts Macao, executive chef Alex Gaspar makes us a coconut chicken curry, minced beef-pork minchi and pork chop bun. The latter is a take on classic beef and pork chop but served with crispy bread. The coconut chicken is a perfect example of the various influences that best represents Macanese cuisine. The dish we try is a beautiful stew mildly spiced with turmeric, coconut braised, toasted under salamander. At Chiado, run by Henrique Sá Pessoa, we learn how to make Bacalhau A Bras. A fillet of cod fish is vacuum packed with salt and cooked sous vide-style for just under five minutes. It’s then tossed in a pan with onions, onion puree, garlic and fried potato sticks. Unlike the traditional way where the egg would be folded in, we are served the confit egg in the centre. With a pour of Vino Verde, or green wine, it’s a wholesome Porto meal done right.
Market walk
The next day, despite the scorching heat, we head to 83-year-old Red Market, a three-storey wet market in Santo Antonio. The produce comes from all across the world: sea cucumber from Mexico, morrels from Hunan, dried fish sourced locally and from Japan. Eggs come in all sizes and colours, from quail eggs are kept in a black sand of dried hay and salt. “This hardens the egg yolk inside,” our guide tells us, pointing to century eggs. “Century eggs are preserved eggs also called 100-year-old eggs that are cured in a mixture of salt, ash and clay which gives the egg a green black colour,” Agular explains. We meet Che Meng Geang, a 69-year-old jovial butcher who grew up on a pig farm close to Macao, and a popular face on local television. He artistically skins the meat and tells us he learnt to butcher a pig before he began to crawl. His shop, Hap Wo sells nose-to-tail parts of the animal. “I will do this till my last breath with a smile on my face,” says the butcher.
Pass the dough
Over three days, we learn to cook a lobster and make classic egg tarts. After seeing a demonstration on how to fold dim sums, we learn to make slap noodles in the restaurant North at the Venetian Macao. All these gastronomic adventures will eventually make it to Agular’s YouTube channel, Eating Around with Pablo . “I hardly do any research before visiting a country, so I have a fresh sense of things. Eating Macanese cuisine has been an eye-opener. So many cultures converge onto the plate. Indian cuisine has a lot of layers. Unlike it, Macanese cuisine has two or three ingredients, and still packs in a flavour. The simplicity of the dish makes it so complex,” says Agular. The Pork Ginger stew is a perfect example. In this dish, ginger pieces and pork knuckles, along with skin, ears and innards, are soaked in vinegar. Another delicacy is the hot pot, which has a boiling stew on the table and a platter of raw seafood to be cooked in the pot. “This was a Eureka moment for me. The best thing about food is that you can cook in a different language,” he signs off, cracking his lobster that’s freshly cooked for just under three minutes in the pot.
See Eating Around with Pablo! on YouTube
