Making the bold career transition from construction industry project manager to chef-restauranteur, Vivian Chan unleashed her creativity and passion for cooking, serving meals from her Old Taipa Village private dining and take-away shop that have become the talk of the town.
With Burmese and Chinese heritage, born in Hong Kong and raised in Macau and UK, Vivian Chan is a delightful blend of these several cultures. “I lived in Macau until I was 12 and was then sent for two years to a girl’s boarding school in Brisbane, Australia where my godparents live. My mother was so strict and strait-laced and insisted on ‘all girls‘! My sister Tiffany preferred to go to England for her schooling and as mum wanted us to be in the same time zone, I moved there too! Northhampton was chosen as there’s a little Macanese community and mum had a close friend there. I then went on to Nottingham University for my International Business degree.”
After graduation Vivian returned to Macau and spent the first 10 years of her career in project management for a construction company specializing in buildings’ external cladding. Competent and hard working she soon found herself in the role of administration and personal assistant for the owner, managing meetings, doing the translations, handling documentation, drawings. Her first project was the Morpheus, Zahar Hadid’s complicatedly beautiful hotel belonging to MELCO. The next projects she was involved in were the Apple store in Sands Cotai, then the Raffles and the Capella hotels for Galaxy.
After a while she began to get itchy feet to do something different. “It was at the end of Covid, the end of 2022, 3 months before the lifting of travel and quarantine restrictions in Macau. My husband Luis Rosendo and I have a soft spot for Old Taipa Village, we hang out there quite a bit, in fact our first date was in Prem1er Bar and restaurant where we’ve become close friends with the owners Bolor and Niall Murray.”
“Anyway we were walking around one evening and saw a little ‘For Rent’ sign outside one of the shops. I called the owner, a lovely local lady, she’d only put the sign up 2 days earlier – it was fate, it was meant to be.”
Vivian gave notice at her construction company and her restaurant, ‘My Messy Kitchen’ was born. Small and intimate, upstairs is the private dining room, with its vintage, homey vibe, seating 10-12 comfortably, up to 17 at a squeeze. Being an old building a dumb waiter can’t be installed so everything is carried on covered trays up and down the 13 steps … “I used to be quite chunky before and now I’ve lost half of me, who needs a gym!”
The open plan kitchen divided by a bar, built by Luis and his brother, with 5 stools make up the ground floor. The rhythms of bossa nova and jazz singer Karen Souza playing quietly in the background add to the relaxed, casual atmosphere. As Vivian and her team of two, Ching Tse and Dewi, prepare the meals, she chats with customers, a social part of the business that she thrives on. “’My Messy Kitchen’ is more than just a business, it’s a community.”
“I guess you could say that cooking and having people around me that I can feed is in my blood!” Vivian laughs. “I get my inspiration from my Burmese grandmother who was an amazing cook, she was a mother of six who regularly opened her home to friends and friends of friends to join in a meal.” For the past 20 years Vivian’s aunt and uncle have run the only restaurant in the huge wholesale market in Isle de Verde initially set up to cater lunch for the market staff but then gradually including dinner for locals, casino workers and occasional celebrities from Hong Kong and Korea. “My younger brother Jackson is a chef. And father, once a banker, gave that up to focus on his passion for wine. His business “實力堡澳門出入口贸易行Setubal Macau Trading Company” imports Portuguese wine to Macau and to China. The China government favours and supports this kind of import business.”
“At ‘My Messy Kitchen’ we take walk ins, phone reservations and pre-booked private parties. Even as early as October we’ve had bookings until December; we’re lucky, we don’t advertise, all our marketing is by word-of-mouth. We are so grateful for the customers who post amazing reviews on their blogs and Instagram and their readers then make a point to find us when they visit. We have regular patrons from the House of Dancing Water, return customers from around Asia and a loyal following of poker players from overseas.” Even award-winning film maker Jon Lister who directs and produces ‘Chefs Uncut’, a Netflix Documentary series on chefs that have left a significant mark on the Asian food scene, “tagged me after eating in my place!”
This is the restaurant’s 3rd year and in that time Vivian has built a solid reputation for good food, a friendly home-style atmosphere and reasonable prices. “We try to focus on quality and not quantity.” Walk-ins are greeted with “we offer smaller portions, cheaper prices, all natural ingredients, no MSG.”
The dishes are Portuguese and Western; distinctly separate, not fusion. There’s a 6-course Tasting Set, On-day a la carte, Specials that change weekly and Tapas (“nothing over MOP60 unless its seafood”) at the bar. “For pre-bookings we have a much bigger menu, which includes fresh seafood that needs a couple of days ordering ahead.” Well known for their pork chop bun ‘with a difference’, Porto style; tender and juicy pieces of pork slow cooked in white wine and Portuguese beer Super Bok. Then there’s duck rice, using the duck cooking liquid for cooking the rice so as to extract maximum flavour. “Our rosemary lamb chops are a favourite, I add Churizo to our minced beef and potato Minchi, we have red wine and lots of veggies in the oxtail stew and I use squid instead of octopus for our salad as it doesn’t change texture with the marinade.”
“I make my own sauces, everything is natural, and I don’t add cornstarch. Instead, I use the potato and spaghetti starchy water and I render down the liquid so our sauces are light, not thick. For sugar I use Korean brown sugar, not the bleached white stuff. Our salt is Portuguese sea salt, olive oil is from Portugal. All my herbs are organic; I source them from small rural shops in China. They are much more fragrant than those from the supermarket. I don’t use a microwave either at home or at the shop, I feel that it changes the texture of food. We have a counter top oven, an air fryer and a gas stove. I always feel that cooking with gas is better, you get the ‘wok hei’ smell, the smoky fragrance coming from the intense heat of stir frying, it tastes different.” As the sign says in the shop, ‘we feed your soul here’ …. “Food is feeling – it’s difficult to teach.”
And what about home life? The couple, with 15 years old son Connah and 4 cats Nib, Lila, Shadow and Flakey, live at the Manhattan, a 3-bedroom, 2-bathroom apartment that is a convenient 10-minute walk from the restaurant and 20 or so minutes from Luis’ work at Galaxy.
The family all tend to meet up at the restaurant for dinner, and Luis often goes there for lunch. Vivian prepares off the menu items for them including salads, sandwiches, “as otherwise they’d get tired of eating the same dishes day after day! We’re open Monday-Saturday, from 12.00 noon until 8.30pm, later for private dining. Sundays are our family day so the shop is closed.”
“I love Macau for its peace and quiet. The atmosphere is warm; people are welcoming and of course my family is here. I have a choice to go to Hong Kong, I have a Hong Kong ID, but I prefer being in Macau where everyone knows everyone, particularly in the Village. We help each other, people in the neighbouring shops will pop by for a chat or to borrow a potato, that kind of thing, it’s a real community.”
My Messy Kitchen, Phone: +853 6326 8999. 1 Tv. da Esperanca, Old Taipa Village, Macau
Article written by Ambiente’s Suzanne Watkinson for the Macau Closer magazine’s Home Affairs section, November & December 2025 issue
