Portuguese confectionery left its mark on various parts of the world, with recipes that gained new ingredients and different preparation methods. The article highlights the connection between Pastéis de Belém, produced in Lisbon since 1837 according to a secret recipe from the Mosteiro dos Jerónimos monastery, and a variant that became a symbol of Macau.
The story of this Asian adaptation has Andrew Stow, a British pharmacist, as its protagonist, who opened Lord Stow's Bakery in Coloane on September 15, 1989. During a trip to Portugal in the late 1980s, he discovered pastéis de nata and, without an original recipe, developed his own version that combined puff pastry with a filling close to British egg custard. Andrew's sister, Eileen Stow, explained in an interview with Macao Magazine that the result was less sweet and did not contain cinnamon.
The popularity of these pastries attracted press coverage and transformed the small bakery into a tourist attraction in Macau. Expansion began with a franchise in Hong Kong in 1997, followed by Taiwan in 1998 and Osaka, Japan, in 1999. Despite the creator's British nationality, the Macanese version became known as pôu tát, a designation that maintains the connection to the Portuguese pastry and helps distinguish it from Hong Kong-style egg tarts.
The current scale of the business was illustrated in an interview published by Macau Magazine in December 2024, in which Eileen Stow stated that the brand's four stores in Macau combined sold between 30 and 32 thousand pastries per day. The executive explained that expansion required investment in worker training and that preparation continued to be done by hand, preserving the method associated with Andrew Stow's original recipe.
