Abraham Conlon’s family is just like the dishes he prepares in his restaurant in Chicago – a mixture of many things. With an Irish father, a mother with Portuguese blood and ancestors across different continents, Abraham himself is an American raised in Lowell, 1,500km away from Chicago. Lowell is a place with a large South-Asian community and when Abraham visited Macau, back in 2011, he felt very at home.
“I was really impressed with how familiar Macanese culture was to me. There are stories from my relatives travelling and living in distant places such as Portugal, the US, Asia, Africa and South America, and my subconscious probably indentified with those stories,” says the American chef in an interview by email.
His visit to Macau was not a coincidence. Abraham, also known as Abe, came to the city with a purpose: to confirm what he had read in Saveur magazine, in 2001, that Macau cuisine was the “original fusion” food. He stayed here for one week with his partner Adrienne Lo – also a chef – and they absorbed as much as they could.
“During that week, we made an effort to find all the Portuguese and Portuguese-influenced restaurants. Before that, we’d been in Hong Kong and Mainland China, and we just wanted to try new flavours we wouldn’t be able to find elsewhere outside Macau,” Abraham explains.
Of all the people they met, Aida de Jesus, the owner of Riquexó Restaurant, was the most influential.
“We had the chance to see her subtle fusion techniques when preparing home-made Macanese food. At that time she was 96 years-old and the fact that she was still in the kitchen, doing everyday tasks and educating her ‘culinary family’, was an inspiration for us,” he says.
Abraham and Adrienne not only felt thankful that they had had the chance to learn with Aida de Jesus, they also felt the responsibility of being some of the few people capable of keeping her knowledge alive.
“We understood this when she told us that if we wanted to have food like what she was preparing, we would need to go to the APOMAC canteen. The people who have all this knowledge about traditional Macanese cuisine won’t be here forever sharing their stories. Regardless of other reasons, that one gave us the impression that we needed to preserve this culture for the coming generations.”
The two chefs also bought A Mesa da Diáspora (Diaspora’s Table), a book by Cecília Jorge, and then went back to the US and decided to create Fat Rice Restaurant. In November 2012 they opened the doors and almost immediately it became a success.
In 2013 Fat Rice was rated as one of the 10 best restaurants in the US by Bon Appétit magazine. In the same year, Diner’s Club selected it as one of ‘The World’s 50 Best Restaurants’, and in 2014 Fat Rice made it to the semi-finals of The James Beard Foundation Awards, annual awards for excellence in cuisine, culinary writing, and culinary education in the United States.
A star-dish called Fat Rice
At Fat Rice Restaurant you won’t find strictly traditional Macanese dishes, but instead a diversity of reinterpretations of Macanese food and also Portuguese and Chinese cuisine. Abraham’s version of the traditional fat rice is the star dish on the menu. His recipe has more ingredients than the original, combining shrimps and clams with chili, wine and butter, as well as the usual meat, egg and toasted bread.
“Imagine a love affair between paella (a Spanish dish), bouillabaisse (a dish from Marseille) and bibimbap (a Korean dish) and you’ll have an idea of how it is,” writes Bon Appétit magazine about Abraham’s fat rice.
The restaurant is well established, but the Chef’s research still continues.
“Macanese cuisine is based on oral traditions and it changes from family to family, so we want to exchange information with as many people as possible and recreate their old recipes, paying tribute to their culture,” says Abraham.
The Macanese community in Chicago is quite small – around 30 people – but some of its members have already visited Fat Rice.
“We love to get their emails with some ideas. We invite them to visit us as much as they can, so we can listen to their ideas and feedback. To talk with people who grew up having this kind of food is what makes us wanting to keep on doing this and doing it right”.
Good food should always be served with good drink and Fat Rice Restaurant decided to add Portuguese wine to its list. Craig Perman, a wine specialist hired by Abraham, travelled to Portugal to look for small-scale wine producers and he found some very interesting labels.
Gravato Palheto is a wine from a largely unknown wine region in the country: Beira Interior. It had never been exported before Perman found it and decided to make it a kind of ‘Fat Rice official wine’. In the US it’s only for sale at Abraham and Adrienne’s eatery – just one of the many things that makes this place special and well worth visiting if you happen to be in the area.
