Michelin Tour at Imperial Studio
Located on the 11th floor of the City of Dreams Macau, Imperial Palace has been awarded one star in the Michelin Guide Hong Kong and Macau for nine consecutive years since 2017.
The Imperial Shadow Building takes "Glorious Era" as its design theme, integrating Chinese palace aesthetics into modern spatial language. On the silver-gold bead curtain hanging at the entrance, the patterns of golden cranes and crystal trees are looming, and the flow of light and shadow makes it look like a contemporary reproduction of "Night Banquet of Han Xizai".
The main hall adopts a "nine-grid" layout, with mahogany screens inlaid with mother-of-pearl lacquer paintings, depicting the four seasons of Lingnan; the window seats face the Macau Peninsula skyline and the blue waves of the South China Sea. When night falls, the city lights and the bright moon over the sea create a stunning view of "mirror-shaped sails returning home".
Among the seven private rooms, the "Purple Palace" has a rosewood carved dome and cloisonné floor tiles. The jade turntable in the center of the dining table can display the dishes 360 degrees, highlighting the noble style of the emperor's banquet.
1. Iberian Black Pork Barbecued with Fruit Wood
The meat is made from Iberian black pork fed with Spanish acorns, roasted for 6 hours using the traditional lychee wood method, and then covered with a glazed crispy shell made from 30-year-old Xinhui tangerine peel and maltose.
It is served on a white marble slab heated to 300℃. The waiter sprinkles Maotai liquor on the spot to ignite the blue flame. The caramel crispy shell bursts in the flame, revealing the rose-pink soft meat. It is paired with the emerald sauce ground from Bama hemp seeds in Guangxi. The fat aroma and nutty flavor collide to create a symphony.
2. Stir-fried pork ribs with mushrooms and XO sauce
The fish, a specialty of Macau's fresh and salt water border, is cut into balls and stir-fried with a secret XO sauce over high heat. The fish bones are deep-fried until golden and crispy and used as a serving dish. The mushrooms used are Yunnan chicken mushroom and maitake mushroom. After the mushroom caps are filled with sauce, they release a truffle-like aroma, which forms a taste contrast with the sweetness of the fish.
3. Crispy Coconut Pigeon
Subverting the traditional braising technique, we use 18-day-old Zhongshan Shiqi pigeon, marinate it with coconut water and lemongrass for 12 hours, then air-dry it and slow-fry it in oil.
The skin is an amber glass-like crisp shell, and you can hear a clear "crunch" sound when you bite it. The juice of the pigeon meat is locked in the coconut aroma, and it is paired with Thai lime dipping sauce to relieve greasiness and enhance the freshness.
4. Diying Sturgeon Soup
The signature soup takes three days to prepare. The Yangtze River sturgeon bones and Jinhua ham are suspended in broth for eight hours, and then hand-shredded sturgeon meat, morels and bamboo fungi are added, and finally sprinkled with edible gold foil frozen in liquid nitrogen. When you eat it, the collagen jelly and the fresh soup dance on the tip of your tongue and it is known as "liquid gold".
Diyinglou is not only a restaurant, but also a mobile Cantonese cuisine culture museum. Glimpse the atmosphere of the prosperous Tang Dynasty from the spatial narrative, and feel the pulse of the future from the molecular cuisine. It reinterprets the definition of "hall-level" with the strict standards of Michelin stars - it is both a pilgrimage site for taste and a contemporary annotation of oriental aesthetics. As the chef said, “We want every dish to become a cultural messenger that spans thousands of years.”