Macanese restaurant Cozinha Aida (窩婆美食) is shutting its doors on 27 February, its owner Manuel António de Jesus has confirmed.
Speaking to Macao News at the restaurant last night, he explained that the Municipal Affairs Bureau (known by its Portuguese initials IAM) required him to move the kitchen to the interior of the restaurant and use only electric stoves instead of the current gas stoves if the business is to keep its licence. He is unwilling to comply.
The closure follows the shutting of one of Macao’s oldest restaurants, A Vencedora, last November.
Currently, the Cozinha Aida’s tiny makeshift kitchen occupies the building’s rear courtyard as well as an adjoining balcony. Both had been enclosed prior to his takeover of the premises nearly three years ago. Such enclosures and unauthorised, small-scale building modifications are common in Macao.
[See more: See photographs from the last ever dinner service at A Vencedora]
In face of the IAM’s new requirements, de Jesus has decided to close down the restaurant he opened in April 2021 to honour the legacy of his late mother, celebrity Macanese chef Aida de Jesus, who passed away one month prior.
“I feel sorry, as does my entire family, that we have to shut down Cozinha Aida. It’s popular in Macao and Hong Kong too,” he tells Macao News. However, he is optimistic that the closure is not the end of the line and is actively seeking an alternative location.
Staffing may be an issue. Cozinha Aida’s chef, Lei Pou Ka, ran the kitchen under the late Aida de Jesus for over three decades, but hasn’t committed to continuing at the new location as he suffers from health issues. If he won’t move, de Jesus is counting on the assistant cook to take the helm, but she is a lady in her seventies.
Why is Cozinha Aida closing?
The location that today houses Cozinha Aida, was long home to Aida de Jesus’ iconic Macanese eatery, Riquexó (before it moved to the neighbouring Avenida Sidónio Pais). It has been home to other eateries prior to that too – all of which relied on the same small, makeshift kitchen.
Cozinha Aida’s permanent closure would be a significant loss for the homegrown, centuries-old cuisine, which is threatened by a decline in the Macanese community’s local population and the difficulties in transmitting the centuries-old recipes.
De Jesus runs both Cozinha da Aida, which operates on a takeaway licence only, and the adjoining eatery, Chong Pak cafe (to which he refers to as “the coffee shop”), which has both indoor and outdoor seating. Though the two establishments operate under different licences, they offer the same menu of authentic Macanese fare and function as the same unit.
[See more: Top 5 restaurants in Macao for Macanese food]
“The coffee shop has been operating this way [with a courtyard kitchen] for nearly 40 years, and that’s never been a problem. Now the IAM tells me I need to move the kitchen to the interior of the 27-seat restaurant, but that would take up one-third of its area,” de Jesus said. From a business perspective, “it does not make sense to keep the business going to serve a mere 20 guests for lunch or dinner.”
“Many more diners can sit outside,” noted the 76-year-old business owner. Last night, the al fresco guests included a young couple from New York, who told Macao News that they had tried Macanese cuisine for the first time at Chicago’s now-defunct Fat Rice restaurant, and were visibly glad to have made it to Cozinha Aida while it was still operating.
The outdoor dining area is also under threat, however, with IAM warning the restaurateur that the tables that line the courtyard of the residential building must be removed. De Jesus refuses, arguing that “the entryway to the courtyard [and] building still has a width of more than 1.5 metres, the minimum required by law.”
If he has his way, de Jesus – who is also the co-owner of Hac Sa Beach restaurant Miramar – will soon relocate the business to a different venue in the same area, as “that’s where the Macanese community is.” He told Macao News that retirement is not in his plans.
Macanese lawyer and playwright Miguel de Senna Fernandes, son of the late writer Henrique de Senna Fernandes and one of the cultural representatives of the Macanese community, laments the shutdown while expressing hopes that the restaurant does indeed open elsewhere.
“Cozinha Aida is more than a restaurant, it’s a gathering place for the community,” he told Macao News. Senna Fernandes’ theatre group, Dóci Papiaçám di Macau, even used the location for a music video made in the Macanese language patuá (see below).
Senna Fernandes added that the shutdown was “a very sad loss over purely bureaucratic reasons, from what I could gather,” and said “oftentimes, in Macao, the strict following of the law leads to other things to be overlooked.”
Oscar Cheng, a regular diner who teaches at the Macao Institute for Tourism Studies said that Cozinha Aida “is part of our intangible heritage” and “therefore the closure is a loss not only to us but to the city.”
