‘With its tender, rosy flesh, sticky skin, all suffused with subtle smokiness and sweetness, I’d almost swim to Greenwich for Stevie Parle’s clay-baked duck’
Stacey, my new favourite front of house ever, deposits a small, viciously heavy metal truncheon at our table. This is because we have pre-ordered (as you must) the clay-baked duck at this extraordinary new restaurant from chef Stevie Parle. Parle himself brings the bird, wrapped in pale clay and looking for all the world, on its nest of pine, like a giant pupa.
Tap, tap with the truncheon, and the clay parts to reveal more layers, hay and fermented cabbage. The larval impression intensifies as cabbage is peeled apart, trailing strings of ducky goo. It’s all very Alien. But out of this vaguely disturbing carapace emerges a luminous “butterfly”: a roast duck, bronze-lacquered in honey and miso, almost too perfect-looking to be real – like one of those plastic Japanese window-display foods. It’s whisked away to return, jointed and carved into pristine chunks, with wafers of purple pickled carrot, roll of cabbage, a sweet-savoury pear (from, I think, its “broad bean and barley miso”) and “fireplace potatoes”, sliced into an armadillo shape, like hasselbacks – nutty, crisp, bewitching – roasted in Craft’s own-cultured butter in the ashes of the wood-fired ovens. The duck alone is worth the schlep to Greenwich. Hell, with its tender, rosy flesh, sticky skin, fat basted away to nothing, and the whole suffused with a subtle smokiness and sweetness, I’d almost swim there for it.
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