Riquexo

History & Lore

Riquexo holds a specific, verifiable distinction: opened in 1978 by Aida de Jesus — universally known in Macau as Dona Aida — it is generally credited as the first restaurant in the city built specifically around Macanese home cooking rather than Portuguese or Cantonese cuisine served separately. Before opening her own kitchen, de Jesus worked in the hotel kitchens of the Hotel Lisboa and Hotel Estoril, a professional background she then applied to recipes that had, until then, largely stayed inside Macanese family homes rather than appearing on any menu. She ran Riquexo for decades, eventually with her family, and became known across the community as the “Godmother of Macanese Cuisine” — a title earned through five decades of unbroken service rather than ceremony. When the family considered retiring and closing the restaurant, public objection from the Macanese community was strong enough to change the plan; the restaurant continued, scaled down but intact, rather than closing. Aida de Jesus died in March 2021 at the age of 105, by which point Riquexo had already outlived the informal, oral-history status of the cuisine it served — codifying dishes that might otherwise have existed only in home kitchens and family memory. The restaurant’s name, Portuguese for rickshaw, references the mode of transport once common on the surrounding streets of Santo António parish.

Local Taste

The menu is built around Macanese fusion dishes that blend Portuguese technique with Chinese and Southeast Asian ingredients — a cuisine that exists nowhere outside this community, developed over roughly four centuries of Portuguese-Chinese cohabitation rather than invented at any single moment. Signature dishes include minchi (minced meat fried with potato and served over rice, arguably the closest thing Macau has to a national dish), tacho (a slow-cooked stew drawing on Chinese, Portuguese, and Southeast Asian components in one pot), galinha à portuguesa (a coconut-and-turmeric baked chicken dish that, despite its name, is a Macau invention rather than a Portuguese import), and a well-regarded feijoada and curry chicken. The cooking is deliberately home-style rather than restaurant-polished — smaller portions, simpler plating, and a menu that shifts with what the kitchen is making that day rather than a fixed printed card.

Setting & Practical Information

Riquexo occupies a mid-20th-century concrete-frame building on Travessa do Matadouro, its ribbon windows and terrazzo floors typical of Macau’s post-war utilitarian residential stock rather than any heritage-listed style. Seating spreads across two modest levels, capped at roughly 40 covers, which means lunch service — the restaurant’s main service period — routinely runs a wait. The address sits about a ten-minute walk from the Ruins of St. Paul’s and Camões Garden, reachable by bus routes 8, 8A, 18, or 19 to Avenida de Horta e Costa. Riquexo is open Wednesday through Monday, 11:30 to 16:30, closed Tuesdays. The restaurant’s modest scale has become part of its identity rather than a limitation the family has tried to outgrow — Riquexo has never expanded to a second location or licensed its name, a deliberate contrast to how thoroughly the egg-tart trade a few streets away turned a single recipe into a multi-branch, multinational business.