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Yum Yum Peking Duck

Review by Georgia Waters

Chinese

Peking duck - along with Champagne and bread and butter - is one of the things permanently featured on my fantasy last-dinner menu.

The 'perfect last meal' is a question journalists trot out lazily from time to time in interviews with celebrity chefs, and the thought of it always puts me into a daydream, conjuring my own perfect meal. It's usually a revoltingly decadent affair starring chilli, garlic, truffles and goose fat. The sort of meal that if it weren't already your last, it would be soon after you had eaten it.

Anyway, it unfailingly includes Peking duck, something I will never tire of eating. It’s a centuries-old Chinese dish of roasted duck rolled into flat, light pancakes with spring onions and hoisin sauce, beloved by Ming emperors and tourists alike.

A friend of mine, who’d never tried it and was frankly sick of hearing me go on about it, suggested we celebrate Chinese New Year at Yum Yum Peking Duck in New Farm.

The name says it all.

The popularity of Yum Yum's original restaurant - at Darra, in Brisbane's outer south-west - lead to the opening of this second venue a couple of years ago on Brunswick Street.

One word of warning: if you’ve got your heart set on the duck (and you should), it’s wise to pre-book a day or so ahead. ‘‘Otherwise,’’ the waitress tells us when we arrive, ‘‘we could run out and that would be very sad.’’

Sad it would be. Yum Yum’s menu features all the typical dishes you’d expect to see at a suburban Chinese restaurant - most priced under $20 - and I’m sure they’re very good, but we’re only here for one thing.

The duck arrives shortly after we do. It’s served in two courses - you pay $55 for the bird, which you can share among however many people you wish - with the pancakes first, then a choice of san choy bow or roasted with plum sauce. We’ve ordered the latter.

A waitress expertly carves the gleaming, maple-bronze duck on a trolley near our table and the pancakes start to arrive on individual little plates, two at a time. They’re everything one hopes for in Peking duck - crispy, skin, juicy well-trimmed meat, and light, warm little pancakes, with cucumber and spring onions adding requisite texture contrast and flavour. The plates just keep coming - we eat possibly eight or 10 each.

The second course is a simple preparation of duck with capsicum and red onion in a plum sauce. It’s not as impressive as the first course - and it’s not meant to be - but I’d happily order a plate of this on its own. It's much better than much of what's to be found a few blocks away in Chinatown, for a similar price.

With a couple of glasses of potent rice wine (shao hsing hua tiao, $5 for 30mL), it’s a very happy Chinese New Year that we toast.
 
Don’t go to Yum Yum for the ambience. Go for the food, be charmed by the service, and remember to pre-order the duck.

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