There are no hamburgers on the menu at The Duck. No cordon bleu, no carbonara, nor anything else predictable. In a town of 3,000-plus restaurants, The Duck confidently occupies a place in the top 1%. And the menu is anything but ordinary.
The Duck opened in April last year to mostly stellar reviews. The food was outstanding, if a bit pricey by local standards. And three months in, says head chef Dah Lee, the staff were celebrating a successful launch.
By August, however, the rains had driven much of Lee’s new clientele away. What began as an auspicious summer turned uncomfortably quiet. Lee shuffled the menu, adjusted prices, introduced a wallet-friendly weekend brunch (bacon and poached eggs, pancakes with lime syrup and fresh cream, eggs Benedict, each for under $5). The tables again started to fill.
As a christening to The Duck’s second year, Lee brought in award-winning Australian chef Glenn Thompson to help create a new menu (something the restaurant plans to do quarterly now, instead of annually). The result is a menu steeped in classic French cooking styles, infused with bistro comfort foods and drenched in Asian flavours.
It’s still not cheap (good things never are). Starters range from $4.50 to $6.50, salads and larger dishes from $6 to $21. Desserts are all $4. Yet for the money, there are few better restaurants in town.
Lee, a broad-shouldered Kiwi of Taiwanese decent, opened his first restaurant some 30 years ago in Wellington, New Zealand. In the ensuing years he has nurtured a penchant for contrasts and his dishes, in the French bistro tradition, are rich with textures and flavours.
Chili salt prawns ($6.50) are dusted in herbs and spices, grilled with heads and tails intact and plated with a half lime and a tasting saucer of sea salt, red chili and spices. Outside the prawns are hard and sticky. Inside the meat is soft and mildly salty with a hint of anise. The salt-and-chili powder provides a tangy, crunchy accompaniment.
Similarly, the coconut cured fish ($4.75) is a thick fillet of mackerel dressed with a tamarind-peanut sauce and topped with a mountain of crunchy, fried vermicelli. The light, airy noodle contrasts perfectly with the heavier, full-flavoured fish; the ever-so-slightly sour tamarind balances the lingering sweetness of the coconut.
For lunch, The Duck serves five-spice pork belly as a salad. On the dinner menu it’s offered as a starter (both at $5.50). As a salad the greens are firm, fresh and crunchy, a vegetarian yin to the succulent, fat-drenched yang of the pork belly.
Mains cost a bit more, starting with the steamed silken tofu with onion and chili jam ($7.50) and topping out with an Australian sirloin ($16.50) and lamb rack with eggplant ($21). The crisp-skin red snapper – a pan-seared fillet over an ample mix of corn and mushrooms – lands somewhere near the middle ($11).
In another town, The Duck is the kind of place that bustles from open to close. In Phnom Penh, however, with narrow expat crowds and wax-and-wane high seasons, such excellence can easily go under-appreciated, if not undiscovered.
Yet The Duck remains unpretentious in its sophistication. And as restaurant prices continue to climb elsewhere, and over-sauced pastas and gourmet burgers proliferate, Duck’s essential gourmet will no doubt ripple through the capital’s culinary landscape.
The Duck, #49 Sothearos Blvd; 089 823704.