How African chicken became Macau’s “national” dish
Macau’s “national” dish is as flavourful as the folklore that surrounds it
It's a long way from Africa to Macau, and connections between the Dark Continent and the Far East do not seem obvious at first. Except what is popularly considered the city’s “national” dish is called “African chicken”.
These days, virtually every restaurant in Macau offers this delicious curry-like concoction. How did that happen?
Commonly regarded as the quintessential Macanese dish, African chicken is really nothing of the kind. Macanese food is home-style local cooking, and represents one of the world’s earliest fusion cuisines, and an enduring link between Portugal and Macau via Goa, Malacca, Timor and Japan.
While Macau’s connections to Africa go back to the time of the first 17th-century Portuguese navigators, the African chicken culinary tradition is merely decades old – not centuries, as is sometimes claimed.
African chicken is a recognisable variant of galinha com piri-piri, which is popular across southern Africa, and which only became popular in Macau in the early 1950s.
