{"id":47523,"date":"2016-12-08T18:07:37","date_gmt":"2016-12-09T00:07:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/news.medill.northwestern.edu\/chicago\/?p=47523"},"modified":"2016-12-08T18:07:37","modified_gmt":"2016-12-09T00:07:37","slug":"fat-rice-brings-macau-to-chicago","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.medill.northwestern.edu\/chicago\/fat-rice-brings-macau-to-chicago\/","title":{"rendered":"Fat Rice brings Macau to Chicago"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>By Nona Tepper<\/strong><\/p>\n<p class=\"dropcap\">She is Chinese-American, from Chicago. He is Portuguese- American, born in Lowell, Massachusetts, an area with a large Southeast Asian population.<\/p>\n<p>But their creation is a perfect merger of their two cultures. It\u2019s also a reflection of their quest to show how cuisines evolve globally.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Three weeks before opening their first restaurant together, with more than 200 dinner parties played host in anticipation, Adrienne Lo and Abe Conlon finally settled on a culinary theme for their new space: Macanese, in honor of the former Portuguese colony located off the coast of Southern China.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s this amazing fusion,\u201d Lo said of the restaurant. \u201cIt\u2019s kind of like who I am, it\u2019s who he is and it\u2019s the things we\u2019ve cooked.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Located in Chicago\u2019s bustling Logan Square community, Lo and Conlon\u2019s Fat Rice is one of the few restaurants in the city, and the United States, that specializes in authentic Macanese cuisine.<\/p>\n<p>The two named the place after <em>arroz gordo<\/em>, which translates to \u201cfat rice,\u201d a traditional Macanese rice dish that includes Portuguese-style pork sausage, Cantonese-style pork shoulder, chili-stuffed prawns, tea eggs and much more.<\/p>\n<p><iframe title=\"Fat Rice\" src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/194730297?dnt=1&amp;app_id=122963\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"autoplay; fullscreen\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>On a recent Saturday night, there was a nearly two-hour wait to get in the place, which has been open for the last four years.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe food itself is just really homey. It\u2019s just like real food, it\u2019s not pretty, but it\u2019s tasty,\u201d Lo said.<\/p>\n<p>The desire to preserve this unique food was the primary motivation behind the duo\u2019s recently released and extremely well-reviewed cookbook \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.eatfatrice.com\/\">The Adventures of Fat Rice<\/a>: Recipes from the Chicago restaurant inspired by Macau,\u201d written by Hugh Amano and illustrated Sarah Becan.<\/p>\n<p>Part-cookbook, part-graphic novel and part-photo essay on Macau, \u201cAdventures of Fat Rice\u201d teaches hungry home cooks exactly how to replicate the duo\u2019s delectable arroz gordo and attempts to preserve Macanese food and culture.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s a cuisine that might one day face extinction.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhen we went to Macau we saw how actually difficult it was to find Macanese food,\u201d Lo said, adding: \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of Macanese people there because they were born in Macau, but they\u2019re not of Macanese blood, meaning Portuguese-Chinese or Portuguese-Indian.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Indeed, less than one percent of those who live in Macau identify as Portuguese-Chinese, according to a survey issued by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).<\/p>\n<p>When creating recipes for the restaurant and new cookbook, Lo and Conlon travelled to Macau, Singapore, Malaysia and many other locales that have dying Eurasian communities. They visited local libraries, bookstores and community centers, and tried to translate the family recipes they found into English.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe way recipes were written, you can\u2019t even decipher what the recipe is exactly because the amount of the ingredient is listed in how much the ingredient cost at the time. So it\u2019s like, \u2018Fifty cents of sugar,\u201d Lo said.<\/p>\n<p>Lo and Conlon also cooked with Macanese families in their home kitchens. Many of their recipes come from Riquexo Caf\u00e9, a community center in Macau overseen by a 101-year-old chef who Lo calls \u201cDonna Ida.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cYou have to go to the community center to get Macanese food because that\u2019s the generation of people still cooking that food\u2014the older generation, the younger generation are not. They\u2019re not interested in preserving their heritage and their culture. So it was just kind of a shock to us and sad to see that so much rich history is just disappearing within a generation\u2019s time.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Lo describes the recipes that they subsequently gathered recipes as \u201creal food,\u201d that is homey, hearty and a mish-mash of cultures. One pie the cooks make, for example, merges fish and cheese. These surprising combinations are why Fat Rice has grown so popular, Conlon suggested.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe offer something different,\u201d he said. \u201cWe don\u2019t have hamburgers on the menu, we don\u2019t have steak tartar on the menu, we don\u2019t do oysters.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The duo plan to keep learning, traveling and evolving the flavors of Fat Rice. The establishment changes its menu about once every quarter, and Lo said customers should expect more flavors from Malacca, Malaysia coming soon\u2014an area which was also once settled by the Portuguese. Eventually, customers can also expect another cookbook, Lo said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe\u2019re exploring global Portuguese cuisine,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd Macau was the last place that the Portuguese were. Prior to that they were in Japan, in Malaysia, India and Mozambique and Brazil. We really are just looking back and tracing their route from Portugal to when they ended up in Macau, and it\u2019s amazing seeing the ingredients they picked up along the way, and cooking techniques, and how things came together.\u201d<\/p>\n<div class=\"featurecaption\">Photo at top: Arroz gordo, or fat rice, is a traditional Macanese rice dish composed of prawns, sausage, oysters and much more. (Nona Tepper\/MEDILL)<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Nona Tepper She is Chinese-American, from Chicago. He is Portuguese- American, born in Lowell, Massachusetts, an area with a large Southeast Asian population. But their creation is a perfect merger of their two cultures. It\u2019s also a reflection of their quest to show how cuisines evolve globally.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":296,"featured_media":47905,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2582],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47523","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-spring-2016"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.6 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Fat Rice brings Macau to Chicago - Medill Reports Chicago<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/news.medill.northwestern.edu\/chicago\/fat-rice-brings-macau-to-chicago\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Fat Rice brings Macau to Chicago - Medill Reports Chicago\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"By Nona Tepper She is Chinese-American, from Chicago. 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