Erotica Amid the Meatballs

TO the question of how a restaurant can season its cooking with an erotic charge, Macao Trading Co. has come up with a laughably unsubtle answer:

Go with bare breasts, and throw in a dozen or so phalluses for good measure.

The breasts belong to naked women in vintage photographs — nothing like sepia tones to class up pornography — on the walls of the restrooms. The phalluses are in a locked wire-cage display case. Made of black granite, they’re supposedly Tibetan totems once used in fertility rites, but I assure you: your first thoughts when you spot them won’t turn to anthropology.

As a waitress said when she overheard my friends and me discussing the erotica afoot, “I’m trying not to think about what working here is doing to my psyche.”

To be fair, I’m describing the smaller, subterranean part of Macao, which has two levels: a PG-13 upstairs devoted principally to dining and this R-rated lounge where the focus is cocktails, though the full menu is available.

But the lounge captures a quality that pervades Macao’s not-quite-Portuguese-Chinese-fusion cooking; the menu’s structure and grammar; and the architecture of the main dining room, rimmed by a decorative balcony brimming with bric-a-brac.

One of my companions put it best. “This,” he said as he alternated between bites of a putatively Portuguese meatball (lamb) and of a Chinese one (pork), “is a deeply silly restaurant.”

That’s what makes it sort of fun, and that’s what keeps it from being anything more than that. In the right mood, with the right stretch of the menu, lubricated by the right cocktails, and with the right tolerance for ear-decimating decibels, you can definitely enjoy Macao, in a minor way, especially now that it’s moved past a beginning for which clumsy is too forgiving an adjective. Macao was downright clownish out of the gate.

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