通菜街 Tung Choi St.: 澳門新馬路福隆新街 Rua Felcidade

A former Portuguese colony, Macau is a rapidly changing society. The new casinos popping up every year are drawing lots of Mainland tourists, as well as boatloads of Hong Kong tourists - good for the economy they say, but seriously compromising the community fabric of Macau with a burgeoning sex trade as well as bad news for small businesses that are just trying to survive in what used to be lively areas. So if you get a chance to come to Macau, do check out the smaller shops. Not only do they have a lot of personality and character to them, but they make some tasty treats and cheap gifts!

This quiet street, Rua Felcidade, has a bit of an old Chinese architectural feel to it, especially with the old wooden second-floor facades of the shops painted in auspicious red. My parents and I found it just a couple blocks from Senado Square, as I was trying to help my mom look for Koi Kei 鉅記, a Hong Kong household name for the famous company of almond cookies.

Rua Felcidade had several little mom and pop shops [like this dessert shop that I didn't get to try :-(] which are actually humble family's homes - they reside on the second floor and open up shop on the first floor, where they are their own bosses and their workers.

And since almond cookies are the necessary gift Hong Kongers must bring back whenever they've made a trip to Macau...

Fresh out of the oven! This sample tray was available at a mom and pop almond cookie shop.

I even saw them making the cookies right there!

One pop of a sample cookie brought my dad down nostalgia lane, claiming "this is how I remember almond cookies tasting like from Guangzhou when I was a kid." These bite-sized cookies are packed with flavor, but not over-powering, and they hold their texture much stronger than the almond cookies they had over at Koi Kei (Koi Kei was the obvious choice for my mom though, "duh, it's Koi Kei!"), but Koi Kei's had less flavor, and was too crumbly. Nonetheless, Koi Kei was packed:

Talking to the older lady over at the mom and pop shop I could easily detect her bitterness. "Koi Kei? I remember them when they were just a tiny little street stall. They've only got their success now because they know how to advertise," she said. Two other ladies were making the cookies in the shop, while a table of men played cards in the back of the room. Later I would see them all gather around a foldable round table in the center of their shop for dinner, as the sun set outside and the road darkened. "Koi Kei's stuff isn't even hand-made, they make 'em in factories up in China...how good could their cookies be? Ours are all hand made, right here."

My pick? The mom and pop shop, hands down. It has no English name, and the guy gave me an opened cookie wrapper with the address on it when I asked for a card. But who cares if their marketing is no good. What matters is that the cookies taste good! And look at what a convenient arrangement their packaging is! Four types of flavors spiraled inside a plastic canister. They're so convenient that I can eat it while blogging on my MacBook!