What is Cantonese Peking duck?

Pin It

Uncle Last-Minute struck again.  Some time past 12:30pm today, dad got a phone call from him, inviting us to lunch at Dragon Restaurant (龍都酒樓).  I haven't really been a fan of this place based on previous visits, but I was told we'd be having Peking duck today.  Dragon Restaurant is pretty famous for its Peking duck, so I was kinda looking forward to this meal.

Not surprisingly, Uncle Last-Minute hollered and dragged us to the restaurant without a reservation nor a confirmed duck.  When he arrived, the restaurant had sold out its allocation of duck for the lunch session.  Fortunately he ran into a family friend who's a regular, and in the end managed to convince the restaurant to sell us a duck from the batch reserved for dinner...

Stir-fried prawns with mayo batter - not exactly my favorite way to do prawns.  I can understand why people want to lightly batter the prawns, but I'm not a fan of using mayo on this... And throwing in a mix of large, green raisins along with pumpkin seeds is just random and weird to me.

The Cantonese-style Peking duck (廣式片皮鴨) arrived, and it was pretty decent in size.  We waited eagerly while the waitress delivered the first plate of sliced duck...

Uncle prefers his duck to have both skin and meat together, so that's how the first plate was done.  I'm no expert on Peking duck, having had just one duck recently after a drought of who knows how many years, but I do like the duck sliced this way.  I had a piece of duck without the pancake, and thought it tasted pretty decent.

The rest of the duck came either as slices of meat or paper-thin layers of skin.  The waitress had scraped away the layer of fat underneath the skin, which I thought robbed it of its rightful flavor.  Of course, Taiwanese people are fairly health-conscious these days so I can understand that this was done to suit local tastes...

Other than the duck itself, the condiments were pretty atrocious...  The pancakes were extremely dry and tore easily.  The spring onions were old, dry and tough; and they didn't bother to cut the ends into the usual "flower" pattern.  Not great...

Steamed marble goby (清蒸筍殼魚) - this looked a little sad when the plate was laid down on our table, because it was just so tiny!  I actually asked if this was supposed to be a whole carcass or half... since they even snapped the tail before serving it to us.  I had about half a mouthful of the fish and left the rest to the family...  It is a yummy fish, though...

The rest of the food was pretty ho-hum as I had expected.  I didn't even bother trying the steamed rice rolls with barbecued pork (叉燒腸粉)...

Pan-fried radish cake (煎蘿蔔糕) - ho-hum.  Would have been better if they bothered to add a little more ingredient like sausage or whatnot into the mix.

Singapore fried noodles (星洲炒米粉) - it's not often that I feel the need for more salt in my food, but this is one time where the dish was just too bland.  Sure, there was flavor from the curry powder, but the execution definitely failed.  In fact, they used glass vermicelli that was just too soft.

Steamed barbecued pork fun (叉燒包) - well at least these looked like proper char siu baos, unlike the ones at Ji Pin Restaurant (吉品海鮮餐廳)...  The filling inside looked a little orange and tasted so-so...

Barbecued pork and soya chicken (叉燒豉油雞雙拼) - didn't taste the chicken, and had a sliver of very fatty char siu (叉燒) that was kinda decent.

Blanched leaf amaranth with whitebait (小魚莧菜) - not bad.

A little disappointed with the duck today, never mind the rest of the meal.  Guess I'll be trying the other famous Peking duck in town next time...  BTW, can someone please enlighten me as to what exactly is "Cantonese Peking duck"?