Early Look: Macau's (Puzzling) Tamarind Pork

Porco Balichão Tamarindo is a Macanese dish, and it’s not just a tasty stew — it’s a dish that really changed the way I looked at food, and how food spreads.

The city of Macau, of course, wears its cross cultural influences on its sleeves. While you can find Portuguese-inspired restaurants meandering the city’s charming narrow streets (and certainly the gauche casinos), I find the Cantonese fare to be incredibly underrated as well — the sheer density makes for some pretty fantastic food crawls.

But most fascinating is the city’s local cuisine. Because unlike the Brits across the estuary in Hong Kong, the residents of Macau were often mixed Eurasians — and over the years developed their own unique cuisine. Their own variant of egg tarts most famously, but also stuff like ‘fat rice’ and a shrimp paste-seasoned mixed stew called tacho (sometimes referred to by Cantonese as “gweilo Buddha jumps over the wall”).

While over the years this fare is getting increasingly endangered (you could probably count the good explicitly-Macanese restaurants out there on one hand), it’s a cuisine that’s perhaps surprisingly had a bit of international reach nonetheless. Perhaps it’s a bit of a reflection of our food world today: if you’re someone that finds yourself straddling between the worlds of Chinese food culture and Western food culture — certainly not an overly rare sight in our globalized world — think it’s really quite natural, I think, to be intrigued by the people that came before us in Macau.

Because before Hong Kong Chacaanteng were serving up a Wild West of Canto-Western fusion, well before David Chang was slinging Pork Belly Guabao in the east village… there were there the Macanese people. With their Chinese influences and their western influences — the “original fusion cuisine”.

But then, if Macanese cuisine is “Cantonese-Portuguese fusion”, how are we to make sense of Porco Balichão Tamarindo?