This week in PostMag: the many layers of Macau
This issue explores the profiles, places and passions that capture Macau’s past and present – from off-duty chefs to indefatigable storytellers
The first time I went to Macau was in 2017, and I spent an embarrassing amount of time lost inside The Venetian. Let me tell you, there’s something profoundly disorienting about a fake sky and canals indoors. I kept passing the same gondola, panic mounting. I suspect I’m not alone in this experience – or in the broader reality that many people never see much beyond Macau’s glitz and glam. It’s easy to visit for a weekend, stick to the resorts and come away thinking you’ve seen the city. But for our Macau issue, we wanted to go deeper into both the past and present.
Elsewhere in the world of food and drink, Elaine Wong looks at where Macau’s chefs eat when they’re off the clock. The answer: roadside stalls turned roofed eateries, izakayas in Taipa and alleyways near Lin Kai Temple, where the same hawkers who once cooked kerbside now run modest restaurants serving beef offal and imitation shark fin soup until dawn.
That must have made me hungry because I devoured Aidyn Fitzpatrick’s profile of journalist Gonçalo César de Sá, almost novelistic in its storytelling. The 78-year-old offers Fitzpatrick a sunset tour of Macau in his blue Mini, and over the course of the drive, an extraordinary life emerges: a Mozambican childhood with a pet monkey that drank port, the Great Wall crossed in bell-bottoms on the first official visit of a Portuguese journalist in China in decades, the 1984 scoop about Macau’s return that nobody believed. He’s still at it, too, running a news website and working into the night.
Paul French tells the story of the Hotel Central and its restoration, a years-long project born from developer Simon Sio Chong-meng’s childhood grudge. After being thrown out by the doormen as a boy, he pointed at the building and said, “One day, when I’m rich, I’m going to buy you.”
And he did. Built in 1928 as the tallest building in all of Portugal’s colonies, the Central was where Ian Fleming sipped G&Ts and gamblers sent bets down to the casino floor in reed baskets. Sio’s restoration brings it back to that era, complete with changpao-clad concierges and art deco chandeliers, in a city that’s otherwise defined by its embrace of the new and glitzy.