Tag Archives: fried rice

Decoy: Peking Duck Dinner

10 Sep

One of my all time favorite things to eat is a Peking Duck meal.  Especially when I get to share it with friends. When that duck is cooked especially well, and the skin is crispy and the meat is succulent, and the hoisin sauce and pancakes and scallions and cucumbers all do the dance of love in my mouth… that’s heaven. I really enjoyed our meal at Peking Duck House in Chinatown a few years ago.

We have a friend who enjoyed Peking Duck as much as I do (maybe even more?) so when I saw that The Infatuation wrote very favorably about Decoy, a place I had been wanting to try, I quickly emailed my Peking Duck-loving friend and we made ourselves a double-date for the following weekend.

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The Peking Duck Dinner is a wee bit on the pricey side at first blush at $65 (woah… just went to the website and looks like they upped it to $78!). But let me tell you… if I could get that much flavor and food and awesomeness out of every $65 (or $78) I spent, I’d be a happy (and stuffed) person.

The Duck Dinner came with 4 small plates, 2 main dishes, and 1 fried rice or side dish.  Plus the duck, which came with duck consomme shots, 10 pancakes, and 3 sauces. And it all came with homemade pickles, decoy chips, and a few extra holes on your belt.

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The chips came out first. I am pretty sure they were fried fish skin of some kind but I don’t remember exactly. I just remember eating them and enjoying them. (And the restaurant was great about avoiding my allergy, peppers, throughout the whole meal)

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Then the pickles, which had a number of different items to choose from, including pickled pineapple.

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Our first selected small plate was Katz’s pastrami triangles.  Very enjoyable, but when you have something like Katz’s pastrami sandwich already being at the pinnacle of the dish, I say don’t mess with it.

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We then had dumplings, though for the life of me I cannot remember which kind they were!  They were good.

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And then the meal began to really ramp up. This was Sweet Potato Noodle Salad topped with Uni (it came with a $12 supplement charge).

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I loved this dish. And this was a few weeks before I had the epic uni experience of Nakazawa.  Usually restaurants are stingy with the uni, but Decoy piled it on and it was deeeelicious. The sweet potato noodles had a nice chew to them that gave the uni something a bit more dense to play off of.

 

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Our final small plate was the grilled wagyu beef pieces, marinated with fresh washabi. Now I don’t really love wasabit… but this steak was one of the best pieces of meat I have ever put in my mouth (yup… I said it).  It was tender and flavorful and just all over spectacular.  This was one of those dishes that as each of the 4 of us split it, I silently wished I were selfish enough to just pick up the entire dish and run down the street with it in hand just to make sure I got to eat every last morsel. (I didn’t… I could not deprive my friends and husband of such awesomeness)

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And then… out came the duck

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With 3 dipping sauces.

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And you think I remember what they were? HA!  Though I kept going back to the more classic hoisin.

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And an incredible picture of the pancakes.

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And lest we forget about the duck consomme shot!  We started with this as a palette cleanser, of sorts, to get us ready for the big duck adventure that awaited us.

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And then we dug in.  Each component of the dish was perfect, with the addition of crispy leaks and some lovely pearl onions to add to the classic other components.

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For our side, we went with soft and crunch vegetable fried rice.  It had goji berries on top!  A really, really great side that went quite well with the duck.

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And as if that was not enough, we still had 2 main entrees to go!

 

First, lobster with wide rice noodles ($10 supplement).   This was very delicious, however, it was covered in sauce which made for the most impossible shelling of the lobster.  We were at a communal table and I was really expecting to launch my lobster claw across the table in an effort to get out every morsel.

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And our last dish of the evening, the marinated and grilled Creekstone rib steak ($10 supplement).  Another amazing fete in beefery.  This melted in my mouth.  Not QUITE as good as the appetizer steak, but still an excellent execution of an excellent dish.

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I was really impressed with our meal at Decoy.  I felt like we absolutely got our money’s worth (even with those supplements and even with the increased cost on the new menu) and it was a great, fun meal to share with 3 other food lovers.  I think I may just need to take a trip back to get my hands on that steak appetizer again though.

Total Nom Points: 8.5 out of 10

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Blue Ribbon Sushi and Grill

9 Sep

One perk of my job is that I get to go on client dinners.  This supplements my expensive eating habits nicely.  Sometimes I wind up at places that are less than ideal (a recent trip to Dos Caminos left me in the prickly position of a waitress saying to me “there is NOTHING on the menu you can eat”… awesome) but sometimes I wind up trying awesome places like Blue Ribbon Sushi and Grill (on 58th Street between 8th and 9th Avenues in the 6 Columbus Hotel).

I had been there once before, however, this time I was with a coworker who knew the manager and he knew EXACTLY what to order.

We started with the lamb chops, which was yummy.  It even converted someone who typically doesn’t like lamb.  Winner.

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It came over a delicious sweet potato puree.

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Next up we ordered the pork belly.

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It was a delicious slice of perfectly cook pork belly with a great balance of sweet and spicy veg on top.

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We also ordered pork and shrimp dumpings, both of which were good, but no better than most NY Dim Sum.

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They enjoyed an order of spicy ceviche. I’ll take their word for it that it was good.

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We also ordered the duck, which came with orange teriyaki, cauliflower puree, and asian broccoli.  The skin on this was so perfectly crisp and the meat was so well cooked it almost melted in your mouth.  One of the top duck dishes I have had.

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And then… heaven came out…

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This was Oxtail Fried Rice.  It came with daikon, shiitake, and bone marrow.  The bone marrow was actually tucked inside an egg pocket.  See it broken open in the picture below.

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This was unbelievable.  One of the best dishes I have ever had.  And it was rice.  The most delicious rice I have ever had!  I actually felt bad while eating this that Mike wasn’t enjoying it with me and look forward to bringing him back here soon just for this dish.  Add this to the list of dishes I will crave during bad days.  Om nom nom nom nom nom nom.

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Just in case that wasn’t enough food, a sushi tray made its entrance.  I won’t go into the specifics (since I don’t remember them anyway) but I can tell you that every piece was awesome.

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For dessert we got bread pudding and this made lovers out of haters.  It was insanely good, perfectly cooked, unbelievably tender and moist, and full of flavor.  YUM!

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We also got green tea chocolate lava cake.  Awesome.  Simply awesome.

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This was a fantastic meal.  Absolutely fantastic.  Knowing what to order is key.  I usually wouldn’t focus on the cooked food at a sushi restaurant, but don’t forget about the “Grill” part of their name.  It’s fantastic.

And that Oxtail Fried Rice… mmmmmmmmmmmmm

Total Nom Points: 7 out of 10