The Reader‘s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. Every day in Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds.
The culinary influence on the cultures Portugal dominated for nearly 600 years isn’t as celebrated as, say, the shotgun marriage between French and Vietnamese food. By some reports it’s been difficult to even find places serving the old mingling of Chinese and Portuguese food born on the tiny island of Macao ever since the island’s handover to the casinos, gamblers, and the People’s Republic of China in 1999.
But Abraham Conlon and Adrienne Lo have somehow managed to bring it to life in Logan Square, drawing on their own travels and the legacy of sailors wayfaring from Brazil to Africa to India to China and beyond. Before the word “fusion” was met with reflexive eyeball rolling, the Macanese were putting seemingly disparate influences together in dishes like arroz gordo, the restaurant’s Portuguese namesake: a deep ceramic casserole stuffed with fatty slabs of roast pork, crispy chicken thighs, dense slices of Portuguese sausage, monstrous beady-eyed prawns, plump clams, tea-infused hard-boiled eggs, olives, chiles, and pickled peppers and tomatoes, all crammed in among rice fused crispy to the bottom of the bowl like the socarrat on a perfectly crafted paella.
In the years that have followed, Conlon and Lo published a cookbook/comic book, The Adventures of Fat Rice, an attempt at creating the most comprehensive collection of Macanese recipes in print. It’s true that there aren’t many others, but the Macanese population is aging, and Conlon and Lo wanted to document that way of home cooking before it was too late. They’ve also opened a bakery and a bar. Its peri-peri chicken is better than that at the upstart invader Nando’s. And Conlon has demonstrated the right way and the wrong way to cook a pig uterus.
