Three L.A. restaurants where you have to order the duck

Los Angeles Times

7 days ago

'To do duck you have to be really disciplined, like cut out your social life,' says Chartchai Vongsanikul. 'Period.'
Vongsanikul, who goes by Chef Bob, is calling me on his semi-day off to talk about duck. He's the chef at Roasted Duck by Pa Ord, a tiny restaurant in a strip mall in Thai Town that specializes in taut, shiny-skinned roast duck. His is the face you see peeking between the row of hanging ducks behind the counter at the restaurant. He lives and breathes duck, spending his days brining, drying, roasting and chopping it, even contemplating duck when he's not in the kitchen.
'Today is my day off, but I have to go in and prepare the ducks,' he says. 'So I don't really have a day off. If you're going to do duck, you should think twice.'
About 15 years ago, during a trip back to Thailand from Los Angeles, Vongsanikul's father asked him to take over the duck restaurant he'd opened in Bangkok. The restaurant served a Kunming-style roast duck, a variation of Peking duck from China. Vongsanikul ended up spending years preparing ducks for the restaurant, tweaking the preparation and presentation to something he believed would appeal to Thai palates.
'There was a lot of trial and error of getting the taste to something for Thai people,' he says.
In early 2024, he had a meeting in Bangkok with Lawan Bhanduram, the woman behind nearly a dozen Los Angeles restaurants, including Pa Ord Noodle. He had actually worked for her for a short time years prior, purchasing goods for her restaurants.
'She was semi-retired at the time,' he says. 'I said, come on, let's do this. I got the duck, you got your name and your brand.'
The pair returned to Los Angeles and opened Roasted Duck by Pa Ord shortly after.
Vongsanikul dry-brines his ducks for a couple of hours, then dips them in hot water to tighten the skin. He paints the ducks with honey, then lets them air dry for 24 hours. The ducks roast, a dozen at a time, at what he calls 'just the right temperature' for one hour.
The duck meat glistens on the plate, arranged in a small heap of skin-clad tiles. The skin is a deep-golden brown, with the thinnest layer of fat underneath. It clings to the duck, delicate and wrinkly, with a fleeting crunch that melts mere seconds after it hits your tongue. The meat is succulent and tender, saturated in its own juices and fat.
Vongsanikul suggests trying the duck on its own first, before sampling the two accompanying sauces. One is a dark soy sauce spiked with vinegar and sliced jalapeños. The other is a gravy fortified with star anise, cinnamon, soy sauce and sugar. It's warm and just a tad sweet.
You can order the duck bobbing in Bhanduram's signature soup ($17), the ruddy broth heady with the flavors of the duck. Or swimming in curry ($17) or on top of a salad ($17). But for duck to the tenth power, there's the roasted duck special, for one ($25) or two ($35), served with the sliced meat and rice or jade noodles.
At Cut Beverly Hills, Drew Rosenberg is just as fanatical about his duck.
'It's like my baby,' he says.
The chef started serving a whole duck preparation ($135) at the restaurant about six months ago, hoping to entice diners with offerings outside of the stellar steak program.
'Everyone loves duck, everyone does duck,' Rosenberg says. 'I wanted to be a little different with how we are presenting it.'
Rosenberg sources his ducks from Mary's farm in California and dry-ages the birds for 14 days. He lacquers the breasts with honey and a spice mixture that includes coriander, black pepper, plum powder and grains of paradise. It's served sliced, the skin so crisp it crackles, each piece its own source of dissolute pleasure. They swim in a seasonal jus rich with duck drippings, brown butter and whatever produce is in season. Earlier this year, there was a luxurious huckleberry jus with Cassis liqueur and fresh mountain huckleberry puree. It was the sort of sauce you scrape from the plate. Now there's a market cherry jus with Murray Family Farms cherries.
On the side is a play on shepherd's pie, made by curing the legs overnight, confiting the meat and folding it into a reduced sherry wine cream that delivers the same lavish oomph as a slab of foie gras. Piped over the top are mashed Yukon gold and Japanese purple potatoes. The first is light and creamy, the latter like whipped velvet.
Rosenberg is also making bao buns with the rendered duck fat.
'I just wanted to kind of take the stuffiness out of the dish and make it fun to eat,' he says.
It may be the most compelling whole duck presentation in the city, but Rosenberg says it's been a hard sell. That's understandable with the other heavyweight proteins on the menu vying for diners' attentions.
'I thought about taking it off the menu because it's not easy to sell,' he says. 'Though we did have a celebrity come in with his wife recently, and they each ordered their own ducks five days in a row. It made me really happy.'
Rosenberg typically makes just eight ducks a week, and pre-ordering is encouraged. Avoid duck disappointment. Call ahead.
When you walk into Olle, the restaurant at the base of the Oxford Palace Hotel in Koreatown, plumes of smoke billow from the tables. The aroma dangling in the air is woody and sweet, like the treatment room at a five-star spa.
What you're smelling isn't marinated short ribs or pork belly caramelizing on a grill. It's smoked duck, steaming in beautiful, pale, hinoki wooden boxes.
'I imported 20 hinoki box sets from Korea,' says owner Eugene Chun. 'It cost me $10,000.'
For Chun, it was a reasonable price to pay for the restaurant's signature dish, a half smoked duck presented like treasure.
During a trip to Seoul last year, Chun fell in love with the smoked duck found at restaurants all over the Gangnam District. Then he sought out a duck farm in Pyeongtaek, a city about 45 miles south of Seoul.
'I discovered this duck farm where they marinate and smoke the ducks for six hours with some applewood and herbs,' he says. 'Around the same time, I learned about hinoki wood, and that's why I started this business.'
Chun, who was running a noodle restaurant in Koreatown called Wonsan Myunok at the time, sold the restaurant and shifted his focus to smoked duck. He opened Olle, named for the narrow paths found all over Jeju Island in Korea, in January.
The ducks arrive whole and smoked from the farm. They're sliced to order, about a half a duck in each set ($89), the pieces fanned out in one of the hinoki boxes. A server places a small burner on the table, topped with a metal tray of hot water. The box is placed over the top and you're instructed to wait a few minutes while the duck steams.
The short wait is quickened by a tray of banchan every bit as grand as the duck itself. Chun's wife, Kristy, prepares 15 to 18 dishes each morning, changing the selections almost daily. Recently, there were four varieties of kimchi, including baby bok choy; pickled radish; chunky potato salad; marinated perilla leaves; bean sprouts; kelp noodles; fried zucchini rounds; a vegetable pancake; and marinated seaweed.
Once the duck steams for two to three minutes, the server makes a show of removing the lid, and the smoke envelops the table in delicate, curling wisps.
Each piece is ribboned with fat and the thinnest layer of skin. Instead of crunch, there's an intense smoke flavor that's just shy of overpowering, and a denseness similar to ham. The meat tastes of hickory and applewood, with notes of citrus and pine from the hinoki. The mound of rice in the middle picks up that same sweet, smoky flavor, and you build alternating bites of duck, rice and the various banchan to cut the richness.
'The hinoki aroma makes it taste better,' says Chun. 'And it makes people more comfortable and relaxed.'
I can't say that the hours following that day's duck were more relaxed, but I was content, and I smelled like I'd been to the spa, and a barbecue.