Macau has 33 casinos, though only half have hotel rooms, approximately 11,000 of them in total. The largest is the Venetian Macau, with 3,000. The second largest is the Galaxy Cotai, with 2,000. Casino Lisboa has 1,000. The MGM Grand Macau and the Wynn Macau have 600 apiece.
In 2009, just under 22 million people visited Macau. That was a drop of 5% from 2008. Through July 2010, 14.39 million people visited Macau, up by 18.7% over the first seven months of 2009.
Visitor comparisons with Las Vegas are difficult, because slightly more than half of the people who go to Macau are day-trippers coming from mainland China; in that way (as well as in the hotel-room category), Macau is more similar to Atlantic City than it is to Las Vegas.
As for fine dining, Macau casinos have the usual fancy restaurants. For example, Lei Garden in the vast Venetian is one of the most respected Chinese restaurants in Macau. However, as far as we know, only one Macau eatery boasts an international celebrity chef: Robuchon a Galera, Joel Robuchon’s Michelin Three Star nine-year-old restaurant at Casino Lisboa. There could be other well-known chefs, but we wouldn’t recognize them if they were. Peter Chan, for one, is the chef at Wing Lei at Wynn Macau, but if he’s well-known, we don’t really know.
We do know that a number of non-casino restaurants have international reputations for great seafood and classic Macanese cuisine. Tim Fat is known for its variety of shark’s fin soup (though this is now a controversial and non-sustainable dish and we’re not recommending it). Lai Kei Restaurant is famous for its abalone. And Clube Militar de Macau is the place for Macanese bacalhau (dried codfish), African chicken, curry crab, and stir-fried clams.
