The world’s first fusion cuisine is hundreds of years old. And it’s still going strong

By Lilit Marcus, CNN

Macao, China (CNN) — Long before Tex-Mex and VietCajun, there was Macanese, the world’s first-ever fusion food.

Macao was Asia’s first European colony. A pair of islands in southern China’s Pearl River Delta, just across the water from Hong Kong, this small colony became an important shipping and trading center.

The first Portuguese explorers arrived here in the 16th century. They brought dried chourico sausages and fragrant olive oils by ship from Iberia, which were mixed with local Chinese rice and spices to create delicious new dishes.

Hundreds of years later, and that culinary heritage lives on in Macao’s streets, with those dishes still eaten in many of the city’s homes today. It feels like a visitor to the city can’t throw a proverbial rock without hitting a restaurant selling minchi (savory minced pork served with rice), African chicken, egg tarts and other traditional Macanese foods.

UNESCO has already noticed. In 2017, the global cultural organization designated Macao a Creative City of Gastronomy, celebrating its nearly 500 years of cuisine, which undeniably includes many influences.

But not everyone is a fan of the “f” word.

“I have a problem with the word ‘fusion,’” says food anthropologist Annabel Jackson. “Since the ‘80s, chefs have been talking about fusion as a very conscious amalgamation of foods from different places. I think the term is quite pejorative and I don’t think we can use it to talk about cuisines that emerged 500 years ago.”

So, then, what is Macanese food? Jackson, who has written several books on the topic, draws a distinction between what she calls Macanese food and Macao food. By her definition, “there is food that literally comes from the kitchens of people who live in Macao and have Portuguese ancestry, and there are hybridized foods that are more localized interpretations of Cantonese food.”

African chicken, for example, can be found in almost any restaurant in Macao. It’s as ubiquitous as, say, a green curry from Thailand. But the version most people eat today bears little resemblance to the one born when Portuguese sailors arrived in Macao from Malacca — an historic region now part of southern Malaysia.

Originally, the chicken — which, despite the name, isn’t African in origin — was prepared with ingredients like bay leaf and coconut milk. These days, though, it usually comes with a tomato and peanut sauce more reminiscent of a satay.

A village reborn

Taipa, one of the historic islands that’s part of Macao, was once home to traditional Chinese and Portuguese villages. Today it’s best known for Cotai, the strip of ultra-luxe casinos that have helped Macao earn the nickname “the Las Vegas of Asia.”

But the city has pushed back against that image in recent years. Hoping to diversify its tourism offerings, Macao’s local government has invested in restoring and improving its heritage sites. One of those is Taipa Village, a onetime fishing village long since emptied of residents. Now, this tree-lined, cobblestone-studded area is home to cute shops, colorful murals and a small museum focused on local history.

It’s also where you can find Casa Maquista, which means “Macanese house,” a restaurant that opened in 2024.

Inside a peppermint-green building, two Portugal-born, Macao-based chefs — who also happen to be brothers — established their vision for a contemporary Macanese restaurant. The chefs, Pedro and Mauro Almeida, didn’t want to compete against many of the Taipa eateries that have been serving classic Macanese dishes for generations.

Instead, the pair dug up recipes that have disappeared from most families’ kitchens. Like so many things in this city of 600,000, they used word of mouth: asking friends to ask friends, coaxing spice combinations from the minds of grandmothers and unearthing old cookbooks out of family attics.

The result is an archive in the form of a menu.

Here, don’t expect the little fussy touches that mark so many modern A-list restaurants — no foams, no tweezers, and nothing frozen that isn’t supposed to be served frozen.

Instead, there’s a curry made with okra, which was once a popular ingredient in Macao but had fallen out of favor in the early 20th century. Roast chicken is prepared with turmeric, one of the ingredients brought to Macao via India. Serradura, or “sawdust pudding,” a Macanese no-bake dessert well suited to the city’s hot weather, has the restaurant’s name doodled on top in cookie crumbs.

“At Casa Maquista, we keep our dishes very classic at heart, but we innovate behind the scenes,” says Pedro Almeida. “We elevate the cooking methods with greater precision, better ingredients, and more advanced technique always with deep respect for the traditional flavor, but at the same time making it possible to be ordered and enjoyed with a reasonable a la carte timing.”

The decor is also part of the Almeidas’ vision. True to its name, Casa Maquista feels like the dining room of a well-heeled Macanese family. Visitors sit at elegant wooden tables, and the walls are adorned with traditional Portuguese ceramics and sepia-tinted photos of old Macao.

The Almeida brothers, who grew up working at their family’s restaurant in the northern Portuguese town of Chaves, are their own kind of Macanese story. Pedro came to Macao in 2016 on a week’s notice to take over the kitchen of a local restaurant. Since then, he has married a woman he met in Macao, convinced his brother to make the move to Asia too, and gotten good enough at Cantonese that he can communicate with his suppliers and local diners.

According to chef Pedro, the biggest misconception about Macanese cuisine is that it’s just Portuguese food served in Macao, or that it is simply Chinese-Portuguese fusion.

“It is its own distinct cuisine, recognized as intangible cultural heritage, and many of its dishes were born right here, not imported ready-made,” he tells CNN Travel.

“What people often miss is the influence that travelled with the Portuguese along the spice route from Goa and Malacca until they reached Macao — especially regarding the spices. Some dishes arrived already shaped by those settlements around the world rather than from Portugal itself, while Macao also created dishes entirely on its own.”

A lasting legacy

Macao was the last European colony in Asia, as it became a Chinese SAR — Special Administrative Region — in 1999, two years after Hong Kong was handed by the British back to China.

These days, modern census data in Macao shows that fewer than 2% of the population are Lusophones, or people who speak Portuguese as their native tongue. While Portuguese-style tile designs fill local plazas and neighborhood shops sell tinned sardines and other products directly from Lisbon, the easiest and most consistent way to find Macanese culture is on a dinner plate.

However, in central Macao, near the Ruins of St Paul’s Church, Guia Fort and other notable historic attractions, is Rua de Jorge Alvares. Just two blocks long, this unremarkable side street is home to a few working-class apartment blocks and a Pizza Hut.

Its name, though, has huge significance: Portuguese explorer Jorge Alvares is believed to be the first recorded European to visit China by sea. Arriving for the first time around the year 1513, he and his men traversed many areas in what we now call the Pearl River Delta, from Guangzhou to Hong Kong to here, in Macao.

It’s unlikely that Alvares could have known how his initial arrival in Macao could have had such lasting effects. But five centuries later, that meeting of Chinese and Portuguese cultures still lingers.

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