Walking around The Venetian Macau (somewhat lost, admittedly) for several hours (the place is twice the size of its Las Vegas sister, the single largest building in Asia and the third largest in the world), I came across some oddities (apart from the expected indoor gondoliers) that gave me pause. Like many other large casino resorts, this hotel contains an extensive interior dining and upscale retail district—The Grand Canal Shoppes—unified within the master theme (in this case, renaissance Italy). Yet in order to provide a sense of variety (not everything can be a pasta ristorante or a gelato shop, right?), other venues have taken root inside. Like Russian nested dolls, these are themes inside of themes.
A traditional Cantonese restaurant startled me as I walked by—The Old Neptune, a smaller satellite location of a larger entity apparently established in 1986 (according to The Venetian Macau's dining website). Ordinarily, I would think that a Chinese restaurant in Macau would require very little design flourish to draw patrons. Not so inside The Venetian. Because the casino complex is itself so lavishly themed—visually “shouting” as it were—this tiny eatery must be just as “loud” to compete. In this way, multiple thematic venues within the same space are like a cacophony of advertising billboards crying out for the attention of passer-bys. I would think that this principle is what drives a place like Las Vegas to greater and more extreme levels of thematic design; it operates here much the same (perhaps more sedately).
Even for this single small restaurant, though, care has been given to provide a transition zone or “buffer” between the Italian grandeur outside, and the aura of classical China within. An artificial sky—identical to those used in the larger grand canal area beyond—isolates the fortress wall architecture and imperial roofline so that they stand apart from The Venetian’s gilded gold, carpeted hallways just outside the doorway.
The interior space of The Old Neptune smacks of most other Chinese themed restaurants—notably the American, Hollywood-ized, Chinatown model. Which caused me to wonder, why? We’re already in China, right? Why does thematic design have go so overboard to immerse me in China if i’m already there?
And then this complex layering of aesthetic meaning began to unravel; I’m not in China, I’m in a former 400 year-old Portuguese colony (Macau is both the first and the last European presence in the region, from the 16th century until the end of the twentieth). Yet moreover, I’m not even in Macau, I’m in Venice—and not the even the Venice of now, but the height of Venice in all its glory, the Italian renaissance.
Formerly Portugal, now the China of today but also Italy of the past—and I somehow have to make the colossal leap backwards through time and space to enjoy Cantonese cuisine in a quiet classical Asian setting. The Old Neptune restaurant not only struggles to project its theme against the the visual competition of its splendid spacial parent, The Venetian, but across the massive rift that keep it from its actual cultural roots—the glories of China old.