Drunken Fish

Moutai at the pass

The grouper meets pickled tomato, chili, bean sprouts and Moutai before Henry Zhang Zhicheng, Executive Chef at Drunken Fish in Macau, lets the dish settle into its sour heat. Zhang has held this post since 2024, after leading kitchens in Beijing and Macau, including a private kitchen in a historic Beijing siheyuan and an Executive Chef role at Ying Jee Club. His first restaurant focused on crayfish, opened when he was nineteen, and that early narrowing of attention still feels relevant here. Drunken Fish asks for range, but not looseness. The menu moves through Cantonese, Sichuan, Northern Chinese and Southeast Asian references, then fixes them to seafood and baijiu with a firm hand. At the pass, Zhang’s task is not simply to add Moutai to fish. He has to decide where the spirit belongs, where it should lift the sauce, where it should perfume a flame, and where the seafood should remain in front.

Seafood worked through baijiu

The restaurant’s method turns on a direct idea: the old Chinese habit of drunken seafood, recast with Moutai as ingredient, aroma and bar language. Red-spotted grouper arrives with Moutai, plus pickled tomato, chili and bean sprouts. Crispy chicken takes the spirit through a flambé. Sri Lankan mud crab goes to the table with black pepper, while Boston lobster is set against homemade curry and abalone is slow-cooked before crisp scallion cuts through the richness. These are not quiet plates, but the structure is readable. Acid, heat, shellfish sweetness, fermented depth and baijiu fragrance each have a station to hold. The room also carries live auctions of premium seafood and rare Moutai liquor, a piece of theatre that changes the raw material before the kitchen begins its work.

A room built around glass and water

The room keeps the kitchen’s signal in view. Hand-bent curved glass aquariums give the seafood program a physical presence, not as decoration alone, but as a reminder of the material moving through the bench. A turquoise Moutai bar pulls the eye toward the liquor program, while the dining room looks out across Performance Lake through a wide sweep of glass. Service runs in an upscale casual register, with à la carte and family-style formats that suit a table built for sharing crab, lobster, chicken and fish. The atmosphere is lively, sometimes ceremonial, and the design points back to the work: water, glass, bottle, flame, sauce, shell.

Macau seafood, one spirit at a time

Drunken Fish sits inside Wynn Macau, yet its point of view is more specific than resort dining usually allows. It binds Macau’s seafood appetite to China’s baijiu culture and gives Zhang a kitchen where a single ingredient can recur without becoming a gimmick. The grouper, the pickled tomato, the chili, the bean sprouts and the Moutai.