Friday, July 15, 2011

Duck, Duck, Duck ... Goose (well beef actually)

The plan for lunch today was yum cha at a Chinese restaurant in one of the local clubs.  I don't know what has happened to Canberra clubs, but there are currently good Chinese resturants in the Italian, German, and Greek clubs.  I would have thought that their own cultures offered enough food variety, but it is Chinese food culture that seems to be thriving.

Yum Cha on a Friday at the Italian Club has been a long tradition, however when we arrived today, we discovered that it is a discontinued tradition!  As we were already there, we decided to eat Chinese anyway and started reading the menu.  Someone quickly voted for a duck dish and we all enthusiastically agreed.  So enthusiastically that someone else suggested two duck dishes.  After some discussion we decided that maybe two wasn't enough, so we ended up ordering three duck dishes between 5 people.

We started with that most marvelous of dishes, duck pancakes.  I have to say, this dish is very high on my list of favourite foods.  While not the best I've ever had, they were extremely tasty, and I could probably just have had a meal of those and been quite satisfied.  The wait staff also helpfully left us with the carcass so once the pancakes had been devoured we could pick delicious crispy bits off the bones.


For main, we had crispy duck in plum sauce and shredded duck with bean shoots and chilli.


The crispy duck had a deliciously crispy coating around very meaty, boneless chunks of duck.  The sauce was generous and nicely plummy.


The shredded duck was almost a salad with lots of bean shoots along with mushroom, shallots, plenty of fresh chilli and other tasty ingredients.  I really enjoyed this one.

While there were a few other duck items on the menu that we could have tried, we did decide to stretch ourselves somewhat and our final dish was chilli beef.  It was tasty, but by then I was in the duck zone and it couldn't quite compete.  I think the waitress was a little surprised at our order, but I have to say, I loved my duck lunch.

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