Post Party Dim Sum

We were sorting out where to eat the day after the Michelin Gala dinner and at the end "settled with" Jade Dragon under the same roof. Well I suppose "settled with" may not be an appropriate description, given the restaurant just kept the highest 3-star rating at the Michelin Guide for 2 years in a row.

Night of Glamour

For the past few years, Michelin Gala Dinner has been one event that I am particularly excited about during the festive December. There's everything that makes this the perfect evening - the excitement, the drama, the glam, the chance to dress up, to mingle, to chit-chat and gossip, and of course, the wine and food that's served.

The Perfect Celebration

We rarely contacted chefs specifically before any visit to their restaurants, not wanting to give them a wrong impression that we were expecting special treatments, but this time I did tell Chef Fabrice a month ago about our plan to eat at his restaurant in Macau, and made a special request to eat inside the kitchen. Blame that on the missus who asked for the "Chef’s Table" to celebrate her birthday.

"Us Time"

Some quality “us time” was definitely in order as we sent the rest of our family off to the ferry pier and drew the big group Macau weekend getaway to a close. We realized we haven't visited The Tasting Room at City of Dreams for a while, so I shot a quick message to Chef Fabrice a few weeks before and let him know our plan for lunch at his restaurant. Unfortunately he was in France on the weekend we were going, but we figured we should stick with the original plan, knowing his sous chef Leonardo and pastry chef Julien would take good care of us.

A Chinese Tasting Menu

I felt we really didn’t stop eating since our long lunch at Morpheus’ Club Lounge followed by a quick tour of the hotel and a dip in their swimming pool on the top floor. We retreated to our suite and found a gorgeous looking cake in Pierre Herme’s signature Ispahan flavor and a bottle of bubbly sitting on the table (thanks Chef Sebastien and his pastry team and for the hotel PR to remember my birthday just a few days back) And soon enough, and a quarter of the cake after, we were back downstairs for our dinner after a couple drinks and plenty of snacks at the fantastic lounge at Voyages by Alain Ducasse.

"Simple" Lunch at the Lounge

Last month we spent yet another weekend in Macao in one of the newest hotels in town. If there’s a time that I made a trip just to check out one new hotel and that hotel alone this year, I am sure Morpheus is high on anyone’s list and I was glad that the PR team at City of Dreams extended an invitation for us to spend the weekend there and to check out some of their facilities.

Overdue Encore at Chef Tam's Place

We went for a repeat of last year’s birthday celebration with a weekend stay in Macau, and dined at the same restaurant on Saturday night as the highlight of our itinerary. But before we got to that, we went to visit a few restaurants as well – with temperature soaring to mid-30s during day time, there’s nothing better to do to hide away and eat (or gamble, I guess, though we didn’t quite manage to do that this time since we were too busy eating)

Settling for an Early Dinner

We were pulling our hair trying to figure out a place for an early dinner in Macau before heading back to Hong Kong Sunday night. On one hand we don't wanna settle for generic, food-court quality food, which was a dime a dozen in the casino complexes. On the other hand, with only an hour or so to spare, it would have been too much a rush trying to go through a proper, sit-down meal.

The Tasting Lunch by Galliot

After making two whistle stops in old town Macau for a classic cha chaan teng followed by a new artisan cafe in the morning, we hopped on a cab and headed to the City of Dreams complex in Taipa for our lunch reservation at The Tasting Room.

City of Dreams is one of the "newer" gaming complexes located in the reclaimed land off Macau now known as The Cotai Strip, with three top hotels, several floor of casino space, a large shopping mall and numerous dining outlets. Those who have been following the Michelin Guide keenly would notice they were one of the biggest winners in the current Hong Kong/Macau version of the book, with one new restaurant getting their first star, and two others got elevated into the two-star category, one of them being The Tasting Room. (we actually ended up trying all three restaurants over the weekend, more on that later)