Best Food In China

Location

It will be difficult to top this paramount example of five star dining.

A design of mauves, grays, and burgundies and a sleekness of lines impress upon you the Iberian atmosphere. Dimly lit and sound proofed from the loud streets, the relaxing rhythm sets in quickly to your weary body.

The menu is presented on an elephantine card, with an ample selection of Macau and Portuguese food. The restaurant is owned by a Macau party and offers a variety of Macau dishes, but coupled with creative infused Portuguese dishes. The recommended and traditional dishes are highlighted on the menu for the befuddled diner to be able to find their way through the fog.

Soothed and expectant at the dishes to come, we fall into the prominent plush couches and peer at the scattered bowls of onions, pumpkins, and fruits. We have ordered the dishes recommended by the waiter, and are set for a feast.

First to appear is complimentary basket filled with soft white bread, sesame bread, garlic sticks, and dried lavash. The lavash is freshly sesame and the basket is a mosaic of home-made freshly baked crunchy bread. We also were presented complimentary pineapple seafood salad in two delicate spoons that was fresh and inviting.

The cuisine is adventurous with textures and spices from Europe, Asia, Africa, and India. There is a taste of everything, Chef Richardo, from Portugal with experience in Macau, has written the menu to convey the Hilton principle of “Eat Right.” The portions come in three sizes: Tasting, Just Right, and Sharing, so that the patron can choose the amount of food and size of serving plate to satisfy their hunger. With a menu that rotates every 3 months, the current menu is a prodigious success with the Portuguese Embassy.

The Macanese garlic bread with black olives and chili is a nice continuation of the credible bread basket given before, and is coupled nicely with the Combo charcuterie platter served with Peixinhos de Morta (80-170 rmb). Filled with copious amounts of gummy prosciutto, delectable sweet cooked ham, pickled salami, perfect savory salami, and perfect turkey, these are meats that cannot go to waste, and would be a sin not to finish!
King Prawn and avocado salad with grapefruit dressing (68-78 rmb) is served quickly, yet the prawns are superb and quite crunchy. The avocado and grapefruit are fresh and fuse well, with the grapefruit giving the salad a strong bite! It is topped with dried fried onion that give it a savory almost peanut like taste.

When served with a Penfolds Chardonnay 2008, the dishes are only topped off to perfection.
A surprising dish is the Double cooked and deep fried Bacalhau with Desiree potato cake and fresh garden herb sauce (48-68rmb). It is presented as a fish cake of sorts, and resembles a tater tot or potato cake. Inside is soft lush fish that taste like potato and is rather pleasant and reminiscent of grandmother’s cooking and childhood tastes. It accompanied with a tomato and onion salad with ingredient so fresh that it is also stupendous and quite scrumptious.

Almost too quickly the soup arrives. It is a Caldoverde Portuguese green vegetable soup with Portuguese sausage (35 rmb). The sausage is tender and the soup is creamy and mild yet heavy and tastes like a potato puree.

Then the Roasted homemade Portuguese Chorizo (48-78rmb) arrives. Made in-house, the sausage is served luke-warm but has a strong BBQ taste and a lingering dash of hot spices. It is exquisite sausage and some of the best we have had since our trip to Spain. You can’t get sausage like this, and the homemade quality is imbued throughout the morsels.

However, the best was still to arrive through the wonder of the kitchen. Presented together, the two mains look equally delightful and it is hard to choose which is better. The Charcoal grille African spice chicken served with truffle mashed potatoes (115-190rmb) is succulent chicken and the best I have had. It is a completely unique dish learned in Macau with ingredients from Macau, Portugal, Africa and India with a secret sauce. I find most chicken to be too dry for my palate, but this one was marinated with paprika, garlic, white wine, and pepper and lemon juice, and then lightly grilled to give it a distinct color. The Dijon like sauce is poured over it to infuse the flavor, resulting in a succulent chicken with rich deep flavors making this the best chicken I have ever had the pleasure of trying. It is served with mashed potatoes that are creamy and very buttery.

The Roasted baby lamb Portuguese style (90-175rmb) is another amazing dish, and with the first bite you are blown away by the taste. The lamb literally falls off the bone, and is soft like a bay’s kin. It is almost unbelievable, and the colossal imbedded flavors overwhelm the taste buds. This is lamb you have rarely if ever tasted and is as good as the suckling lambs of Iberia. It is slowly cooked with carrot, olive oil, salt and pepper, and celery in a vacuum pack for four hours and then steamed. Soft and gluttony it was made for a glutton. It is served with large fried rectangular and chunky potatoes that are a cross between a sweet potato and a regular potato. So unique and interesting, like nothing before, it is undoubtedly the greatest potato I have encountered.

To be fair, there is only so much of the lamb you can eat, as it is very muttony, but thankfully is served at the right amount. The taste buds did accommodate to the extraordinary taste of the lamb, but the chicken continued to grow on you. Both were amazing and true quality with taste that continued to linger even 5 to 10 minutes after finishing the dishes.

We ate these incredible specimens with rich Bordeaux 2006 from Terra Burdgabla with hints of fruits and berries.

Incredibly satiated we eagerly awaited our desserts. First to arrive was the Serradra ice cream of condensed milk flavor ice cream and cookie crumble (38 to 78 rmb). In Macau this is served like a Mousse but Chef Ricardo has given his own spin to it. It was so cold yet so soft, almost impossible to create! Yes, the vanilla milk based ice cream was amazing, with a rich milk flavor, and almost incapable of melting. The cookie crumbs surrounding the ice cream was equally sweet and scintillating.

The Macau egg tarts with raspberry sauce and Milk tea was also luscious. The egg tarts were not greasy but mild and creamy and fresh. The raspberry sauce enhanced the contradiction between sweet and savory and massaged the tongue softly. The milk tea was also a surprise and impeccable. Light and sweet and not as strong as typically served it was easy to finish it off.

Vasco’s was an almost heavenly experience, and indescribably one of the best restaurants we have reviewed. The prices were also reasonable considering the quality you are receiving. In fact it was almost a crime to charge that amount for such enticing food.

The only blemish in the jewel of Beijing food was that the prices of drinks were overdone. Cocktails were the standard price of 50 rmb, but they made a killing on canned beer. For 50-65 rmb you should be getting a beer on tap or at least in a bottle. However, the food is impeccable and at a steal. The wines are imported from Australia, USA, Italy, France and even includes Portuguese sherry. Champagne is 160 rmb a glass, and wines range from 70-90 rmb per glass. For dessert we had the Puerto Fino Sherry. I believe we were accidentally given an “off” bottle, as the other wines were flawless. The color was off and lighter than convention would have it, and the taste rather than sweet was sour and bitter. I am sure the staff would have gladly given us a new bottle if we had to bothered to ask, but we were so content and exhausted from our meal we chose simply to let the desserts linger on the tongue for one finally minute.

Vasco’s offers an adept and accomplished dining experience. The food and wine is utterly matchless, and Vasco’s and the Hilton have proven it is customer orientated not only with its innovative meal portions, but with its cultivated service. It will be difficult to top this paramount example of five star dining.

-- by Larissa Paschyn

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