Horizons used to be and may still be considered the worst fine dining restaurant in Macau. The restaurant itself is beautiful. The flatware, the wine list and other instruments that you need to make a great meal are there its just the service and until recently the food was horrible.

That should be changing, Guillaume Galliot who used to work at Raffles in Singapore and in Beijing has been there for 6 months and is finally going to be releasing his first menu. Last night I got a good sampling of the new menu and the food was superb.

Unfortunately the same people still work there as when things started but hopefully that will change. Below are some samples of the food. Once the service levels are addressed this may end up being one of the best restaurants in Macau.

Next weekend Horizons & Guillaume will be hosting the Chaine dinner and 3 chefs with 3 Michelin stars a piece. That will be a true test if they can pull it off as the people in Chaine are notorious for either making or breaking a restaurant.

Horizons is @ the City of Dreams Macau Level 3 of the Crown Towers.

A new set of cookbooks is about to hit the scene by a guy named Nathan Myhrvold which some might know better from Microsoft or his current job as big boss of Intellectual Ventures the patent mega wherehouse. What people don’t know about Myhrvold is he is a French Master Chef. Interesting right?

His cookbook set is called Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking it promises to bring modern technology into cooking. There has been a lot of hype over molecular cooking in the last few years and this is supposed to further that 10 fold.

Everything sounds great so far but here is the rub, the 5 volume set has a MSRP of $645.00USD. No that is not a typo, six hundred and forty five US dollars. Amazon does have a special pre-order price of $467.62 but even at that it is still steep.

The other thing I wonder about is why a technologist like Myhrvold didn’t choose alternative delivery methods such as an iPad app, Kindle books etc where he could of embedded rich media into it. You give me the volumes + an iPad app going over everything in vivid detail with videos and other media and maybe we are getting into the right value proposition.

Seeing as the book is not released yet and there are limited samples out of the contents only time will tell whether this has overall value or if it’s YaCB (yet another cookbook) in an already overcrowded market.

The website for Modernist Cuisine can be viewed here, it is flashy and has a lot of content. Maybe once I finish perusing it I will decide whether to buy this. Or if you are interested in buying it an Amazon link is available below.

I’ve been going to Aruna’s in Macau for ages. She has some great flavors going on but last night as we were eating a rat ran across my foot. I can’t say that will be the last time I will go there but it will be a long time before I go back.

Last year the Encore @ the Wynn opened up in Macau. Walking through the new tower which is decorated in a retro sort of color scheme you might miss 99 Noodles situated on the side of the ‘mass’ gaming hall. I put mass in quotes there because it quite possibly is the smallest mass gaming hall anywhere.

Like everything else in the new tower the restaurant is tiny but good things sometimes come in small packages. This has easily become my favorite lunch spot in Macau. The noodles are all made fresh, there is a good variety of mostly Northern Chinese flavors. The staff here is great as well. The vibe, unlike most Chinese restaurants or noodlehouses, is warm and friendly.

My personal reccomendations would be the one string noodles with home made spicy minced pork. Have those noodles with some Sichuan dumplings in chili oil. The first is quite spicy for most people so if you do not like spice this is not the dish for you the Sichuan dumplings are not terribly spicy but more of a good balance between sweet and spice.

Really my only complaint about the place is that it closes at 1AM. On many a night I would love to have a bowl of noodles instead of a McDonalds cheeseburger.

What makes a fantastic dining experience, is it the food, service or a combination?

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