Two Macau-style Restaurants

A small update here, about two restaurants in the style of one of my favorite cities: Macau! Truth be told, Macau's food is one of the reasons I love it so much. There's excellent Cantonese-style food, there's excellent Portuguese-style food, but best of all there's a local, pan-Portuguese cuisine, mixing Chinese and Portuguese with Portuguese Colonial influences. The two restaurants mentioned here aren't quite up to the real thing, but they're both excellent restaurants.

The first is Macau Portuguese Restaurant, on Xikang Lu near Wuding Lu - putting it right around the corner from Thai House, my favorite restaurant in Shanghai. Stiff competition, and maybe Macau Portuguese loses out in comparison - they're both semi-casual, good-value restaurants. Macau Portuguese Restaurant is slightly more formal, but slightly cheaper. Here's what I had last time I visited:



That plus a salad bar plus a Lemon Iced tea cost 30 kuai, about $4, not bad at all! If I lived or worked nearby, I imagine I'd be going there all the time. The restaurant has weekend buffets, and on weekdays offers a large number of lunch specials. Menus are in English, and much of the staff speaks English - along with Pilipino, and there's a Pilipino menu. You can see from the picture above that my dish was extremely rich from a butter-sauce, which is endemic to the restaurant. I ordered pork and black fungus, ha ha have I gone too local-style? Anyway, here's the other lunch-set options that were available that day:



So if that restaurant is very good, I'd have to say that Lisboa Macau Restaurant is outstanding, and one of the best restaurants in Shanghai. However, that comes with the caveat that the environment is basically a step up from a cafeteria. Really, it's just a large uncarpeted room with a bunch of IKEA-esque tables and chairs. There's two branches, one in the Times Square Mall East of Huangpi Nan Lu Station, and one on the sixth floor of the Super Brands Mall, near Lujiazui Station.

Regardless, the food is what's important. While the food has a definite localized tilt to it, it's a restaurant where just ordering whatever sounds like it might be tasty nearly always pays off. It's the first good restaurant I "discovered" in Shanghai, back when I was still new to the city and killed time just wandering up and down Huaihai Lu. I've been a number of times, and I've never been disappointed. However, it's not one where I've taken a number of pictures, and here's a not-entirely appetizing look at the African Chicken, a specialty dish from Macau:



They also have danta available - while the origins are debated, they're a small egg-custard tart, very good, and very common throughout Shanghai. The danta at Lisboa Macau are excellent, particularly the creamier, egg-white version. I would call them the second-best danta I've had in Shanghai - I'll have more to say about danta soon.