Spice China

On the 65th day of a duck's life, slaughter, feather and gut it. Cut a slit in the skin near the neck and, through a long tube, blow air in between the skin and subcutaneous fat to separate them. You're only really concerned with the breasts here, so don't knock yourself out. Toss the loose-skinned duck carcass briefly into boiling water, then hang it to dry for 24 hours, coating the skin with anything from malt-sugar syrup (back in the day) to maltose (a more modern substitute). Now introduce it to the oven. Traditionally, your oven should be fired with pear or peach wood, though any hardwood will do. Light the wood, let it burn out, then hang your duck inside, sealing the door for another 24 hours while the ambient, convective heat and smoke cooks Daffy straight through. Alternately, the cooking can be done in an open, hardwood-fired oven with the duck hanging above the flames. But with this process, you have to get your duck pole down off the wall every few minutes, hook the duck off its rack and dangle it at the edge of the flames for thirty seconds. Repeat this process for hours.

When your duck is done cooking, the fun starts. The skin should be removed (carefully) using a very sharp knife, stretched across the cutting board and sliced into thin, crispy strips, sometimes juiced with a sugar/garlic sauce. Then the breasts — damp with melted duck fat, as tender as a lobe of foie — must be removed whole and sliced, ideally with the shape of the breast preserved. The legs are chopped clean from the body and placed bone-in on the tray alongside sauce, pancakes, the obligatory vegetables and the deconstructed duck: skin on top, breast below. At the very least, it is a two- or three-day process to get a Peking duck just right. Most modern Chinese restaurants knock 'em out in about an hour, pan-roasting the bird and then serving it chopped up like hash.

But not at Spice China. Chef Jack Mok takes two days to prepare his ducks. And while I don't think he has a time machine in the back, an original Chinese brick oven or a direct line to a Nanjing duck supplier, only the most freaky, annoying purist would ever notice. He serves his three-legged ducks the right way: a full breast, expertly deboned and sliced with a flashy double-cut that makes for about a hundred bite-sized (or pancake-sized) pieces, topped with shingled strips of crisp, sweet, smoky duck skin the color of caramel candy. And in a sop to completely piggish duck junkies like me, he also tops the breast with a flap of fatty skin that's perfect for chewing after it's dipped in the cup of super-sweet and nutty, savory, smoky, chocolate-brown hoisin sauce.

There are also the traditional scallions and batonnet-cut sticks of cucumber for flavor and texture contrast, but as I do with those Buffalo wing celery sticks, I ignored them completely — instead crunching strips of sweetened duck skin like potato chips made of flesh, folding handfuls of duck meat inside thin pancakes slathered in sauce, grinning like an idiot. Before I was done, I'd consumed the equivalent of half a duck, plus an extra leg, washing it down with cold Tsingtao beer and shots of jasmine tea — devouring the object of my affections, my fanatical searching, before the meat had even grown cold.

Not that it mattered much to me, but Spice China does more than just Peking duck. In fact, Peking duck barely rises to the level of a house specialty at this huge, multi-purpose treasure chest of kooky Asiana, being listed dead last on a page that offers specials of Hunanese chicken and scallions with black pepper, peasant hot pot with tofu, bok choy and Chinese mushrooms, and (amazingly) a super-traditional five-spice Chinese pork that arrives at the table like something out of a cartoon: an entire pork shank — an entire ham — served bone-in, skin-on, slow-roasted and rubbed-down with Chinese five-spice powder until it has achieved the texture of fine barbecue and a flavor that's like eating the steam rising over a Shanghai spice market. And that's just one page of this remarkable menu — one of eighteen.