Kitchen, The - Grand Lisboa

Since 2008 at the steakhouse pass

Simon Li keeps the plate spare enough for the beef to read first. As Chef at Kitchen, The - Grand Lisboa in Macau, he works inside a steakhouse whose discipline depends on timing, heat, and restraint rather than garnish. Li came through Macau hotel kitchens before this post, moving from sous chef at Grand Lisboa Hotel in 2006 to a later leadership role at guincho a galera at Hotel Lisboa. Those rooms gave him the habit of detail that now sits behind the service at The Kitchen, where the Head Chef seat has been his since 2008.

Simon Li does not treat steakhouse cooking as a narrow brief. Premium beef and seafood arrive from around the world, but the method stays close to the ingredient: clean handling, precise doneness, a plate that does not crowd the centre of the work. His lineage here is a Macau one, shaped by Grand Lisboa Hotel and Hotel Lisboa, and by the particular discipline of hotel kitchens where repetition can sharpen or flatten a cook. Li has used the long runway at this station to keep older references visible while bringing contemporary control to the pass.

Beef, seafood, and a Macanese memory

The program at The Kitchen is built around steakhouse service, but Li’s signature dish, authentic Macanese Style Portuguese Chicken, gives the room its more personal line. It is not an ornamental aside to the beef. The dish carries roots, memory, and a local register into a dining room otherwise defined by premium cuts and seafood. Li has described it as “a reflection of my roots and a vessel of emotion,” and the sentence matters because it explains the restraint around the dish. The work is to keep the flavor legible, not to perform nostalgia.

That same control shapes the steakhouse side of the kitchen. The cooking asks for a clean read on ingredients sourced beyond Macau, with tradition and innovation held in the same frame. The restaurant holds Michelin-starred recognition for this work, attached to The Kitchen itself and to the consistency of Li’s tenure there. Awards can make a room sound fixed. Service does the opposite. Each pass has to return the plate to the same level of clarity, whether the centre is beef, seafood, or Macanese Style Portuguese Chicken.

The room around the pass

The Kitchen works from the 3/F of Grand Lisboa Macau, a hotel setting where the room has to carry polish without taking the work away from the plate. The counter and pass belong to a steakhouse vocabulary: beef at the centre, seafood close by, sauces and sides measured against the main ingredient rather than made to compete with it. Guests see a restaurant tuned for hotel service, but Li’s cooking keeps the hand visible in quieter ways, through restraint, sequencing, and the decision to leave enough space around flavor.

Macau sits in the food here without needing to announce itself in every course. It is clearest when Li brings Macanese Style Portuguese Chicken into the same house as imported beef and seafood, not as contrast, but as part of the room’s range. The close of the plate matters. So does the memory inside Macanese Style Portuguese Chicken.