All activities / Culinary / Cooking / Macau Peninsula
Culinary / Cooking in Macau Peninsula
The dense old core of Macau on the Pearl River delta, the heart of the city's UNESCO-recognised Creative City of Gastronomy, where four centuries of Portuguese, Cantonese and Southeast Asian trade fused into Macanese home cooking of minchi, tacho and Portuguese egg tarts.
Why here
Macau is a UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy, and the reason is Macanese cooking, arguably the world's first fusion cuisine, born four hundred years ago when Portuguese sailors, wives and cooks met Cantonese kitchens and the spice routes of Goa, Malacca and Africa. It is home food, not restaurant show food: minchi of minced beef and potato, tacho stews, African chicken, curried crab, and the caramelised Portuguese egg tart that the city made its own. Because so much of it lives in family kitchens, the way to learn it is a hands-on class with a Macanese cook. Chef Antonieta Manhao, known as Neta, teaches classic dishes in her studio and has taken the cuisine into an award-winning cookbook, while dedicated pastry workshops on the peninsula walk you through laminating and baking the egg tart from scratch. You cook, then you eat what you made.
Best months
Classes run year round and are hands-on and small, from a couple of Macanese main dishes in a two to three hour session to a focused egg tart pastry workshop. Some cooks teach on a rolling schedule confirmed by message rather than a fixed public timetable, so book ahead. Macau is humid; spring and autumn are the most pleasant times to pair cooking with walking the old town.
Getting there & around
Both cooking experiences are on the Macau peninsula, reachable by taxi or bus and walkable from the central hotels and the Historic Centre. Neta Club runs on a confirmed-by-message schedule, so contact ahead through Facebook or email; the egg tart workshop books online. Macau is easy to reach by ferry or the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau bridge, and a class pairs naturally with a morning in the old town.
Skill levels: beginner, intermediate
Schools & guides (2)
Neta Club Cooking Studio
SchoolNeta Club is the cooking studio of Chef Antonieta Manhao, a Macanese cook born and raised in Macau who has spent years teaching the city's home cuisine. Her small hands-on classes cover classic dishes such as minchi and Macanese chicken, and she has guest-cooked at hotels including St Regis and MGM. Her cookbook, Homemade Macanese Cuisine (Receita di Casa), won Best Trilingual and Best Portuguese cookbook at the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards 2025. Classes are booked directly by message.
smallWORLD Experience Macau
SchoolsmallWORLD Experience runs a hands-on Portuguese egg tart workshop on the Macau peninsula, at its kitchen on Avenida Venceslau de Morais, teaching the pastel de nata that Macau adopted as its signature sweet. The open-level class introduces the tart's history and technique, then guides guests through making the dough, the custard filling and baking, with tasting and take-home tarts. It is an experiences company with a Macau base and bookings online.