Robuchon a Galera

Happy 2010 everyone! Hope this new year brings you all that you desire! I wished for a new Red bike but, instead, a lunch at Asia's 3rd best restaurant will do me just fine. Robuchon a Galera is Macau's only three Michelin-starred restaurant and is located at one of the old-time establishment's in town, Hotel Lisboa. And you thought Michelin only produced tyres! The Michelin brothers actually first introduced the guide to help drivers find lodging and a decent meal on their travels.


Now, the Michelin guide is a must for any gastronome in their search for the perfect meal. A three-star rating is very rare and according to my friend, Wiki, there are only 81 three-starred restaurants in the world. Galera is richly appointed, sumptuous blue and gold carpets in a traditional setting.



The French menu ranges from the $2288HKD ($300AUD) 12-course degustation menu to the $398HKD ($55AUD) Executive lunch. The winelist resembles an over-sized phonebook - big enough to fill the 6100 different wines on offer (the biggest winelist in Asia). We opted for the four-course lunch plus the sommelier selection of two wines to match our meals.

Jon's entree - caviar on salmon tartar with shiso sprouts and melba toast.... (what the hell is a shiso sprout?)


My entree - Lightly smoked foie gras shaved on vegetable pot au feu with horseradish...mmmm..foie gras.


Our soup selection - Jerusalem artichoke veloute served with shredded duck confit and black truffle....amazing depth in flavours and crunchy duck bits!


Jon and Erick's main course - Pan-fried Kurobuta pork loin, fricassee of artichoke and capers with peanuts and verjuiced jus... Kurobuta pork is supposedly the tastiest pork in the world from the Berkshire pig.


My main course - Jugged wagyu beef cheek in ravioli with green asparagus...super tender beef.


We also had a selection from the dessert trolley -







And by that time, we were rolling out of our seats. It was an amazing experience and we left relatively intact - about $850HKD a head including our wines and coffees. Not the kind of food you could eat on a daily basis unless you want to end up looking like a Berkshire pig but certainly worth the visit if you are in Macau.

Our very esteemed friend, Mr Jonathan Buchanan, paid us a recent visit at Casa de Nova City and we hopped over the border to Zhuhai.


We also spotted another West Aussie on the streets of Zhuhai.... clothing store Jeanswest. They are now supposedly fully Chinese owned and have been since the late 90's.



And of course, the infamous shopping pit....


And today is the day all us Zaians have waited for - we finally find out the fate of our show. It's no secret that our show has had problems from day dot; shoddy build, uncooperative partner, puzzling audience, reduced Mainland visa's, etc. We'll all know in a few hours!

Margaret's Cafe e Nata

Hello happy readers! We were lucky enough to have some visitors with us over the last few days so had an excuse to fill up on Portugese egg tarts (Nata) and charcoal roasted meats. Thanks Kieran and Mel! And what better place than Margaret's Cafe e Nata in Macau to satiate cravings for buttery, flaky crust and caramelised egg. Margaret's (like most cool places in Macau...) is hidden away in an alley right near the Grand Lisboa and Sintra Hotel and is difficult to find - just ask for directions! If you get stuck it's at the Gum Loi Building Tel: 2871 0032.



Portugese tarts have a more caramelised top than their Cantonese cousins and a flakier crust. The 'Margaret' here is the ex-wife of the owner of the most famous egg tart store in Macau, Lord Stow's. When they separated she opened her own store on the peninsula. The tarts we had were piping hot out of the oven and lucky we bought 2 boxes as the first box was gone in no time, as were our taste buds from being burnt off our tongues. Ouch! But such is the sacrifice for good tarts...



From there it was necessary to walk off our caloric adventure past the gaudy Grand Lisboa, rising like a peacock plume out of the Macau alleyways. And then on a bus across the bridge back home to rest our sleepy heads and full tummies.


In other adventures over the last few days; rum and coke by the electronic devil, encountering giant jackfruits in the Three Lamps district and having to appease the Gods for all the above.

Ou Mun - ''Gateway of the Bay''

This morning we went across the bridge to Macau to have a bite to eat and stroll around. A friend of ours frequents the Ou Mun Cafe ('Macau Cafe') so we decided to check it out for ourselves to see what the fuss is about. Ou Mun Cafe is near Senado Square off a side alleyway adjacent to the McDonalds called Travessa de Sao Domingos.





It's a Portugese-style Cafe serving drinks, sandwiches, pastries and other light eats. The exterior is quite nice, has a cafe-deco feel and is well signed. Inside it is quiet so it works well as a place to get away from the crowds that can sometimes be around Senado.

Nat wasn't overly impressed with the menu so she just grabbed a fresh OJ while I had an espresso and a toasted croissant. The cakes and pastries looked pretty tasty in the displays and they have various newspaper clippings of the history of Macau and the cafe framed on the walls.



Ou Mun Cafe is ok but not fantastic. If you want a quick coffee or bite to eat while around Senado there are worse places. Our OJ, espresso and croissant came to $70MOP (around $10AUD) so pretty mid-range - maybe a bit cheaper than what we'd pay back in Perth but not by much. From there we went across to the next side-alley further North-east off Senado, via another small pedestrian alleyway (Travessa da Se). Exploring the pedestrian alleyways in and around Senado Square is a lot of fun. There are a wide range of small stores selling everything from clothes, electronics and the various local delicacies. Nat was still hungry after only having her OJ (which, I admit, I drank half!) so we went to a little snackery we had been to before.




This type of eatery is very popular in Hong Kong and Macau. It's a semi-DIY routine where you pick various skewered meats, seafood, fresh vegetables, tofu, etc from the selection out front and place it all in a gigantic stainless-steel bowl. The lady at the stall then places your selection into a boiling vat of stock where it is freshly cooked and optionally covered in a mildly spicy curry sauce in a styrofoam bowl. Drumroll please...


So, yes, I did eat again. The croissant was really small I swear! Nat had a mix of mushrooms, tofu and gourd while I had some fish balls (as in 'balls' of fish, not what you were thinking....), meat balls, tripe, broccoli and tofu. Cost - $68MOP (almost $10AUD). And I was pretty full after that!

On the same small street there is a gelato store, a pastry store and also the famed Lou Kau Mansion which is a traditional Cantonese-style mansion which was built back in 1889. It is very well preserved and gives us an idea how the Chinese lived back in that era.



Talia was a real hit with the lady doing Traditional craftwork in the mansion. Something about babies that turn grown men and women into bumbling messes and it somehow seems more prevalent here in Macau. Interestingly, the mansion doesn't have a kitchen. Supposedly this was because the owner believed his concubines were there to give him pleasure but not in the gastronomic sense.

ZAiA turns 500!

Above: Me and Cirque founder Guy Laliberte

ZAiA, the Cirque du Soleil show I work with, celebrated our 500th show on Sunday. By coincidence, the founder of Cirque - Guy Laliberte - visited last Thursday (our 497th show) so we got to celebrate 3 days early. I had the chance to do two things last Thursday I had never done before:

1. Shake hands with a billionaire (Guy's fortune is estimated by Forbes at $2.5bil), and
   
2. Shake hands with someone who has been in outer space (Guy recently spent 11 days in space as Space Adventures' seventh private spaceflight client - at only $35mil!).
   

For a guy who has that amount of money and has had the privilege of going to space, Guy seemed like a very down to earth guy (sorry, I couldn't help myself). He even cut the 'birthday' cake and handed it out to us all.



I heard Guy was out of Macau the next morning at 9am. On and off to another one of his show's around the globe I am sure. For someone that started out his working life as a street performer it's a pretty amazing story.

As you've probably noticed (if anyone out there is actually following this blog...cue tumbleweed...
mum...you do remember how to go online right?).... I am back to posting pics. It was just a momentary lapse of stupidity on my part.

Here are some random pics from the last month or so.....

Angie's first day of school!!

She'll kill you - with a smile!

Our little Beach star!

The Demon-Dog of American Literature

James Ellroy

Something a bit different. My brother Gav asked if I would write a book review for him to post on his new website which he is currently developing for his weekly e-comics (http://gatoons.com/). We're both big James Ellroy fans and Ellroy's newest novel was recently released in the last few months. Having spent the last couple of days writing and editing it, why not post it here for your enjoyment!


Blood’s A Rover
By James Ellroy
A book review


Clay lies still, but blood's a rover;
Breath's a ware that will not keep.
Up, lad; when the journey's over
There'll be time enough for sleep.

A.E. Housman

And so begins the conclusion to James Ellroy’s Underworld USA trilogy. Ellroy, the self-proclaimed ‘Demon-Dog’ of American crime fiction, is probably best known for his crime novel turned critically acclaimed film L.A. Confidential (99% on Rotten Tomatoes!). Blood’s a Rover follows a lot of baaaad shit that went down in the USA between 1968 and 1972 – Nixon’s 1968 Presidential campaign, the shadowy machinations of the FBI controlled by J. Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes’s Vegas power-play – thrown in amongst Red-sympathisers, rogue FBI agents and Haitian voodoo-men. Blood’s rounds out a turbulent time in American history, concluding what his sublime American Tabloid (following 1958-63 USA) and its follow-up, The Cold Six Thousand (1963-68) begun. Ellroy writes like Dillinger with his Tommy Gun – a staccato-beat unlike any other. Blood’s may not be as sparse as his brilliant White Jazz (1992), but his sentences here are still nigh Jazz riffs served up like a jab to the kidneys.

Par exemple…

“The noise was big. Wayne dodged sign-wavers. Nixon signs bobbed upside his face. He lugged two big steamer trunks. Nixon was at the Fontainebleu. He had to walk. He couldn’t drive. The elephant stampede shut traffic down”




Above: Hoover, Hughes, Monty, Nixon and Castro.

The story goes with White Jazz back in 92, Ellroy handed his editor a 900-page draft. His editor only wanted 350-pages so Ellroy eliminated all the verbs, adjectives and did away with normal sentence-structure - thus Ellroy’s staccato-beat was born.

Two main characters return for the grand finale; Wayne Tedrow Jr - ex-cop and right-hand man to the Mob and Dwight Holly – J. Edgar’s FBI henchman and racist hate spreader. A new character is introduced - Donald Crutchfield – a pimpled peeping-tom and bug-man (as in ‘wire-tap’) on the way to losing his soul. Ellroy mixes these fictional characters with real-life heavyweights – FBI Director ‘Old Girl’ Edgar Hoover, Howard ‘Drac’ Hughes, ex-champ Sonny Liston – and ties them to real-life events. He does this with such aplomb that we’re willing to accept his history as status quo.

Blood’s picks up from where The Cold Six Thousand left off – Wayne Tedrow Jr left to fill Ward Littell’s job as bagman to the Mob in their quest to build casinos in the Dominican Republic. Dwight Holly, the ultra-right FBI agent and J. Edgar Hoover’s favourite G-Man, in the middle of Hoover’s fear of the Black power movement and his left-wing radical girlfriend. And probably the most interesting character, Don Crutchfield, supposedly based on a real-life Private eye but on the page clearly a young Ellroy (who has written in his memoir, My Dark Places, of his youth as a voyeur and petty thief).

Noir doesn’t get any blacker than this. Chandler this ain’t. Ellroy is Chandler on a 3-day crack binge chased with Red Bull and a double espresso. Blood’s will satiate Ellroy fans thirst; if you are an Ellroy virgin, maybe try the first of his L.A. Quartet – The Black Dahlia or the ‘10 times better than the movie’ L.A. Confidential. The language is not as staccato’ed and Ellroy used sentences back then. And from there…well, I envy you.

If you like hard-boiled crime fiction ala Dashiell Hammett or Ross McDonald you'd probably like Ellroy. If Twilight is more your thing, you probably wouldn't. Although, Howard Hughes (in Ellroy's world) did get pretty weird and vampire-like in later life so you never know. Remember the Simpsons episode where Mr Burns walked around in Kleenex boxes as shoes? Well that was based on Hughes as he descended into madness. See ,Mum, all that Simpsons WAS educational!

Here's the story, of a man named....

Is this a line up from Macau's Most Wanted? No, it's our happy family! These were our recent (read - 3 weeks ago) passport photos for our Macau 'Blue card' which is the equivalent of a working visa back in Australia. The process is long (like most things in Asia...damn bureaucracy!) and we have been lucky enough to visit the tranquil immigration centre four times now. But we've finally been approved and the girls all have a nice green stamp in their passports which allows them to stay in Macau under a 'Family stay permit'...or 'relatives of a Blue-card holder' (read - me!). So no more visits to Hong Kong to get an extra 10 days on our visas, as much as we like Hong Kong. This also means we can avoid situations like this at immigration from HK or Zhuhai (China)....




Well, it's usually not that bad on most days. I believe public holidays are often like that. Speaking of Zhuhai, I managed to head North over the border to our seaside neighbour just yesterday. Zhuhai is the closest stop over the border in China for us here in Macau and it's where we go for cheap shopping ('unreal' Armani, Gucci, DVDs, etc), cheap massage (40RMB for an hour - $6 AUD!) and cheap(er) food. It's quite a difference crossing the border because there is a distinct, tangible difference in the air, the people, the streets. The best way I can describe it is that Macau definitely feels more like Wan Chai or Mong Kok in HK than distinctly mainland Chinese.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to go to Zhuhai to meet with Tai Chi master, Li Zheng. Master Li teaches Fu Nei Pai Tai Chi (lit. 'Within the mansion') which is a rare form of Yang style Tai Chi.



The story goes that Yang Luchan, the creator of Yang Style Tai Chi, originally taught 10 sets of Tai Chi within the Imperial Mansion of Prince Duan and these 10 sets are what is known as Fu Nei Pai. The Yang Style in prominence today was developed later by Yang Luchan's grandson, Yang Chengfu. Master Li lives in a pleasant sea-side suburb about 15min by car north of Zhuhai city. We had a nice afternoon together chatting about Tai Chi and he corrected some of my (1200) techniques : ) I hope to visit with him again soon.

In other news, Angie is settling in nicely at her new school. She attends Mon-Fri 8.30-11.30am and sometimes Saturday. She looks so cute in her uniform! And they even have a separate sports uniform(!!) All at 3 years of age. I can't upload pics at the moment but will be shortly due to PC issues.

Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi are playing in an exhibition match this Saturday at the Venetian Arena. Cirque will be putting on a little show between matches so I will probably be courtside to mop up their sweat, bottle it and set up a stall in Zhuhai. It may even cover my massage costs for next time...

Tie fune!

Above: Tie fune...oops I mean Mifune....

So just another day in the gusty wind-blown islands located within the South China Sea, on Monday evening a Level 8 typhoon named Koppu came to within 150km of Macau. We happened to be in Hong Kong overnight, but that's another matter altogether. According to Chinese-English news source, Xinhua, no less than 145 minor accidents were caused by Koppu as it swept past Macau towards the mainland province of Guangdong. A Level 8 typhoon according to the Hong Kong Observatory and the Direcção dos Serviços Meteorológicos e Geofisicos de Macau (the blokes measuring the wind, i assume) may contain winds of up to 180km/h (113mp/h) and Level 10 is a full blown hurricane with winds of up to 220km/h(138mp/h). Now that's pretty quick, even for a Monaro (i'm sorry for all you non-Australians out there....).
But you'll all be glad to know that we arrived back to Macau yesterday in one piece...albeit I was a greenish hue from the boat ride over... Trust my parents, they came over (to Australia this is...) in a plane - i'm sure if they came over in a boat I wouldn't suffer from sea sickness. Speaking of my parents, they are here in Macau with us as I write this. I can hear them snoring from the spare room.
And just like me...the first meal we had today was....Burmese food! A Burmese family comes to Macau and what do they want to eat? Not Macanese, not Chinese...but Burmese. It was probably my fault as I took them to the Three Lamps district.



Above: the hard nuts on HBO's The Wire - best TV series ever?

Something lately that I'm loving - The Wire. I must thank my brother, Gav, for getting me onto this HBO crime series. It really is that good. I guess I shouldn't have doubted his judgement - we have pretty similar tastes. And what's even better is I've only just finished Series 2 - another full 3 seasons of crime-filled goodness! All the more reason to visit Zhuhai, the mainland city north of the border where the pirate DVD trade is full blossom. Sorry HBO, but I did buy the first 2 seasons legit - give me some slack if I just skip over the border and buy the last 3 seasons in one huge, Chinese style-almanac version with a label for a 1992 Van Damme film glued to the front! And you just have to love a series with a character that's named Stringer Bell. If you haven't seen it yet...do it now...your life will be more complete!