Macau Restaurants|Macau, China

Aurora

Name: Aurora
Telephone: 853-2886-8868

Macau's contemporary table with an Italian spirit

VERIFIED LUXURY

Learn How We Inspect

The traditional recipes of Italy are dressed up and refined at Aurora, the stylish and upscale restaurant located inside Altira Macau. With a contemporary, sleek dining room complete with terrace seating as the backdrop, the Forbes Travel Guide Five-Star restaurant delivers gorgeous plates of seafood, meats and pastas made from fresh, seasonal ingredients.

Our Inspector's Highlights

With room for up to 120 diners, chances are that you won’t need to make a reservation for Aurora. On weeknights, you can typically walk into the sleek, contemporary restaurant and expect to be seated quickly, even if you’re hoping for a table on the restaurant’s attractive outdoor terrace.
The views don’t get much better than at Aurora, located on the tenth floor of Altira Macau hotel. The floor-to-ceiling windows mean that even on rainy days, the restaurant has unobstructed views of the Macau skyline and the sea that surround Taipa island, where the hotel is located.
Beneath complex dressings and ingredients commonly found on Aurora’s menu such as creamy sea urchin, delicate parsley sauce and frothy asparagus foam lies a foundation of simple, traditional Italian food. Whether it’s a rich, wood-fired pizza or plate of homemade pasta boiled to perfection and served with the catch of the day, Aurora has something delicious sure to satisfy your Italian craving.
Don’t be fooled by the somewhat daunting turns of Italian phrasing seen in the artful menu descriptions of Aurora’s cuisine: the attentive waitstaff will clearly describe everything in great detail if you’re not quite sure what to expect from a certain dish.
If you’re in the mood for something not on the menu, try asking for it: the kitchen will try to accommodate your request on the fly, which is particularly nice if you’re traveling with kids who are picky eaters and just want some plain old spaghetti.

Things to Know

Though the restaurant’s dining room is dressed up with white linens and fine china, you don’t have to dress up yourself. The dress code is smart casual and you’ll see plenty of diners here in jeans.
The open, glass-encased wine cellar is a focal point of the dining room, and it’s stunning. You can request to sit in the wine lounge, where you’ll have to choose between a view of the hundreds of bottles of wine on display or the lights of the Macau Peninsula and surrounding ocean.
The service is impeccable. We were never left thirsty and the timing of the meal was well-paced and perfect, something of a rarity in a town just learning its way around fine dining.
Aurora has an open kitchen design that allows you to watch your meal being prepared from start to finish. The chefs are surprisingly cool, calm and collected, as they assemble the attractive, precisely-plated Italian cuisine.
If you’re dining at Aurora on a special occasion, there is a circular private dining room just outside the entrance of the restaurant that creates an intimate, romantic spot for a special meal.

The Food

Start your meal with the smoked prawns with red capsicum sauce appetizer. We loved how perfectly the prawn’s subtle sea saltiness mingled with the delicate red-pepper sauce.
We highly recommend the fish fillets, which change depending on the season and the fancy of the chef. Whatever the type of fish, it’ll be simply prepared to accentuate the natural flavors and complimented with an innovative side, like the sea bass with saffron puree, vegetable caponata and capers, which was on the menu during our most recent visit.
We're still daydreaming about the handmade fettuccini with Mediterranean mussels, sea urchin and parsley juice. The pasta was al dente and the sea urchin and mussels were a delightful combination.
High-quality cheese platters can be difficult to find in Asia, so we simply couldn’t resist the opportunity to put one together from Aurora’s large selection of cheese sourced directly from Italy.
At the risk of being too broad, any of the housemade desserts on the menu are sure to satisfy your sweet tooth. If we had to choose just one, however, it’d probably be the decadent manjari chocolate temptation.

The Look

Aurora is an attractive modern room that’s punctuated by the incredible views of the skyline and surrounding sea that can be seen outside the floor-to-ceiling windows. The copper guild combined with the open kitchen creates an environment that feels warm and inviting, and simultaneously dressy and sophisticated.
During the day, the room has the feel of a casual bistro, while at night, the addition of white linen tablecloths and candlelight gives the space a more romantic feel.
The table is always set for romance at Aurora, whether you’re dining indoors in the restaurant’s expansive dining room, a beautiful space marked by its pleasing copper paneling, candlelit tables and Italian marble countertops, or among the small bamboo groves at the restaurant’s breezy open-air patio.
Attentive service is a significant part of the luxurious dining experience you’ll enjoy here. You’ll barely have a chance to pour your own tea, refill your water or even place your napkin on your lap: the friendly waitstaff almost seems to know what you need before you do.

Amenities