What happens when five Americans, a Bosnian and a Serb walk into a bar? When the bar is empty, available for rent, and the meeting takes place on an afternoon in early 2008 in the Tribeca neighbourhood of New York, the group of friends decide to open a restaurant inspired by Macau.
Billy Gilroy, a legend in the New York restaurant scene, was responsible for the unlikely encounter. After decades of listening to a friend sell him on the idea of a restaurant inspired by Macau – an idea illustrated through pleasure and tradition, antiquity and modernity, Asia and Europe – the American finally found the perfect location to play out the fantasy.
“I have a friend with a huge passion for Asia, who has lived in Hong Kong and Shanghai. He always told me about Macau, and said he would invest in a place like this. I liked the idea, but knew that it would only be successful when I found the right space,” Gilroy recalls. “I thought about it for years, and when the right space appeared, I immediately recognized it.”
The space was in Tribeca, in the downtown area of New York, an abandoned region for decades that found new life after September 11. With high ceilings, a large first floor and a basement, the location was perfect for accommodating the restaurant Gilroy imagined.
After getting the green light from friends, the entrepreneur immediately organized a trip to Macau with the seven partners and a few investors. Four of them – Henry LaFargue, Jason Kosmas, Dushan Zaric and Igor Hadzismajlovic – were already partners in Employees Only, the successful cocktail bar opened in 2004, and they were joined by friends Akiva Elstein and Patrick Fahey.
“At that point we had already done a lot of research, we already knew the history of the peninsula, the 500 years of Portuguese presence, but the trip was essential as inspiration,” says Gilroy. “We couldn’t make a restaurant inspired by Macau without ever having gone there.”
Upon arriving, the first impression they got was a city linked to the sea and its harbour.
“Port cities always have a very rich and specific history. They are never just one thing, they have a complex identity and that was what I wanted to convey,” says Gilroy. “I’ve never made a steak house or a sports bar. I don’t make something that is markedly only one thing, because it is very boring.”
The group quickly decided that the name of the restaurant would use the word ‘trading’, to emphasize that aspect of the city.
Over the course of their stay they went to Chinese, Portuguese and Macanese restaurants; to the most celebrated places in the tourist guide books, and family places on the street that people had pointed out to them. They talked with chefs, visited monuments and museums, bought books, collected catalogues and took photographs.
“I can’t reveal everything that happened on the trip,” says Gilroy, laughing. “But I can assure you that we had a lot of fun.”
Casinos and informal gambling houses were visited, as were places where there was prostitution.
“We went to the district of red lanterns. We wanted that sense of underworld, outlaw. When I create a space, I like people to leave the real world behind and feel that they have entered the scene of a movie, a different world.”
That’s what Gilroy did at Employees Only in the West Village, which attempts to recreate a US bar during the prohibition years, from the music, to the drinks menu and staff uniforms. As American Vogue wrote in 2012, the entrepreneur “knows how to create a restaurant with an atmosphere that transports us.”
Also on the trip was chef David Waltrick, from sophisticated French restaurant Chanterelle. Invited by the members, Waltuck had the opportunity to explore his passion for Asian food and create a menu of Cantonese and Portuguese inspiration for Macao. On the menu there are, for example, cod fritters with Chinese celery, an interpretation of pork à alentejana combining chorizo and mussels with bok choy, and grilled octopus with Asian vegetables.
“The food is inspired by this mix of cultures, Chinese, Portuguese, Indian, African, Asian. We wanted to incorporate these techniques and flavours to offer an experience similar to what is found there,” says Gilroy.
The drinks menu also shows the same influences, with cocktails such as ‘Drunken Dragon’s Milk’, which combines vodka flavoured with green tea leaves, pandan syrup and coconut puree.
By the end of the trip, Gilroy had the space mapped out: on the outside it was to look like a warehouse of a port; no sign to indicate the restaurant, only a red lantern. The facade was, however, only to be a distraction to what happens inside: a space inspired by a brothel and opium den.
“I thought this was a very seductive idea of Macau, where even today gaming and prostitution are legal, but historically it happened in a very discreet way, behind closed doors.”
Gilroy went far and wide in search of objects for the restaurant, which the magazine Time Out described as “one of the most stunning settings in Manhattan.” At the entrance guests find a bar decorated with large iron pillars, weighing about 700 kilograms each, and a lounge with capacity for 82 people with a balcony all around, full of objects that recall life in a port. Downstairs to the basement leads to the most decadent space.
“Here, basically, it’s all about sex,” explains Gilroy, pointing to Chinese opera posters with sexual motives, where wives teach concubines how to satisfy their husbands. “But as it is all very old, it ends up having class.”
Opium smoking sets dot the shelves, as do Buddha’s and Tibetan fertility sculptures. Gilroy admits that the latter look like “big black dildos.” On one wall, there is also a Portuguese azulejo tile showing a caravel set to sail, found on a farm in Argentina.
“Everything is old, authentic, and helps me to tell a story,” says Gilroy. “This stage where I create all this is the point where I always fall in love with this business. That’s why I continue to open new places.”
Born and raised in Queens, as a teenager Billy Gilroy started working in his grandparent’s restaurant as a bar and kitchen helper. New York was a different city in the 70s and one day, after waking up in a police cell, he decided to get away from it all and head upstate to an alternative community, to learn yoga and meditation.
These efforts ultimately didn’t pay off, and after passing through France, he returned to the city and became a bartender. He came to spend his time at La Gamelle in Soho, with Joaquim de Almeida, when the Portuguese actor was still only a student at The Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute.
“He was a huge success with women,” he recalls. “They loved him.”
He began to open restaurants and bars and became an inescapable figure on the New York scene. He collected customers and famous friends like designer Giorgio Armani and model Cindy Crawford, and among investors in his restaurants are models, artists and TV and film producers. When he began to prepare Macao, he had already opened five restaurants and been married five times. The joke that he had a new wife for each new restaurant soon began to do the rounds.
In late 2008, with the world economy in a fragile state, with much anticipation Macao opened its doors. The opening ceremony of the Tribeca Film Festival took place in the venue.
Eight years later, a red lantern continues to advertise the space, but it is now accompanied by a sign with the restaurant’s name on it. The menu has also changed to better reconcile the Chinese and Portuguese culinary inspiration. But little else has changed. New Yorkers, as in the first weeks, have kept on coming. Celebrities such as Beyonce, Jay-Z, Ed Burns and Gwyneth Paltrow have also visited. And Gilroy, despite having opened three other restaurants since, is still on wife number five.
“This one is here to stay,” he says. “The restaurant and the marriage.”
