best peking duck in peking. good service.
reasonably priced

This is without a doubt the best Beijing roast duck, nay the best duck, in the world.

It is where all the foreign dignitaries are taken by their chinese hosts to taste the pinnacle product of chinese culinary technology.

You can expect to pay about 100 kuai per person if you just order some duck, a few of the cheapest dishes, and a couple of beers each. Otherwise you will be looking at western prices as this is one of the city’s fanciest restaurants.

It doesn’t look much from the outside - the building itself is a very old and drab-looking housing block on the corner of a dirty and unspectacular intersection on the city’s 3rd ring road. The inside is tastefully decorated for what one must first presume to be a 1970’s bistro. Very similar to the Fawlty Towers dining room in fact. (If you want something a little classier you can go to their other branch at the back of ???????, ???? but I personally prefer the older one… it’s just less stuffy).

The menu is EXTENSIVE. It must weigh about a 1.5 kilos at least. Prices, as I say, range from the reasonable (around 40 kuai for a standard portion of gongbaojiding) to the absurd (thousands for lobster-meat-noodles in sea cucumber and abalone sauce, probably with a pangolin garnish). There are pictures of every dish and english translations (which are surprisingly enough 100% accurate).

However, I would urge any visitor not to be distracted by this selection - your main objective is the duck! It’s incredible. Served with soft, fresh, home-made pancakes along with the sauce, spring onion and the not-so-traditional-yet-still-delicious accompaniments of: cucumber, garlic paste, and 2 types of pickles. It also comes with a bowl of sugar - this is to dip the duck skin in and eat on its own - try it, it’s amazing! You will ALSO get a few small bread rolls that look like mini-hamburger buns which you can fill just as the pancakes. The duck itself is brought to your table and cut into exactly 120 slices by an expert chef. The skin is served separately and you will also be presented with the head (this is a polite gesture to demonstrate that a duck has indeed been specially culled for your enjoyment and you haven’t just been served the leftovers of someone else’s) which is split open so that you may enjoy its nutritious contents. A final offering is a long slither of tender meat from the back bone of the duck. Like the chicken’s “oyster”, this is generally regarded as the most succulent morsel. Once the duck meat has been served, the carcass is taken away and boiled to produce a bowl of incredibly ducky soup for each diner (included in the price).

Now a few words on technique (I’m hoping that for my efforts this gets made a ‘featured review’ by the all-powerful Qype fairies). If you ask the waitress (they all speak basic English) she will demonstrate how one can assemble a duck pancake entirely with chopsticks. That’s right - in Beijing’s duck temple you can’t just dollop on loads of sauce with a spoon, cram in as much duck as possible before your co-eaters take it all, pile it high with cucumber and spring onion and then heavy-handedly roll it up and chomp it down. No no no. Take a pancake and lay it out flat. Take two slices of duck meat and dip into the sauce so there is a liberal coating on the underside. Place the duck slices, sauce-down, onto the pancake in the middle of the bottom half (6 o’clock). Garnish with a few sprigs of the onion and then fold the top half of the pancake over the bottom half so you have a semi-circle with a bulge in the middle. Open your chopsticks so that one falls on either side of the ‘bulge’ and press down so that the sauce glues the two halves of the pancake together. Then folder over the ‘wings’ on either side of the bulge so that you have a neat little package that can be easily picked up. Voila! Now that you’ve got the hang of it you can experiment with the other condiments - the trick is not to overfill it! There’s plenty of duck and you can always ask for more sauce and pancakes!

My other (cheapish) recommended dishes are: chef’s special stewed aubergine, black pepper beef with chrysanthemum flowers, and the winter stewed bamboo shoots (you’ve never tasted bamboo shoots until you’ve had these).

After your meal you will be given a complimentary fruit platter, ornately served above a bowl of dry-ice. They used to offer a free bowl of pudding too but now they don’t. HOWEVER, along with your fruit they will bring you… wait for it… a free strip of double-mint chewing gum (not sugar-free)! The cherry on top, if you ask me.

To conclude this epic review, I will tell of 3 more bonuses of this restaurant.
1) It has western toilets. If you’re out and about and you need a poo - wait ‘till dinner time.
2) It’s within walking distance from lots of bars and clubs.
3) It’s ALWAYS very busy so you will have to wait for a table. Why is this a bonus, you ask? Well because while you wait you can drink unlimited free wine! Western wine to boot! FREE! So if you’re waiting for about an hour (which is to be expected) you can literally get wasted… FOR FREE. In fact I will go all the way and recommend that you go at about 6pm on a saturday to really make the most of this fantastic opportunity. You could even factor this in to plans for a big night out - eat somewhere else first and then turn up here and take a number… after about 45 minutes of quaffing just aggressively (but in a distinctly restrained, even polite, way) say you can’t be bothered to wait any longer and then head off to a superclub. I must urge you not to do this too often though as we don’t want to abuse the system to the point that they only offer tea or something. I reckon this is what happened with the puddings - some American probably trundled in hopping from table to table just as the plates were being cleared, big spoon in chubby-hand.