Roast duck is the one Beijing dish that every visitor has heard of, and it is also the one where the choice of restaurant changes the experience most. The birds, the ovens and the carving are all standardised within a tradition and quite different between traditions, so a good meal here starts with deciding which style you want rather than which name you recognise.
Hung oven and closed oven
The older of the two methods roasting duck in Beijing is the closed oven, in which the bird is hung inside a sealed brick oven heated beforehand and cooked by radiating heat, with no flame in contact. The result is a bird that is cooked evenly and stays moist, with skin that is crisp but less glassy. The hung oven, the method most visitors meet today, uses an open oven fired with fruitwood, with the duck hung on a pole over the fire and turned by hand; the skin is dried beforehand and the direct heat puffs it away from the flesh, giving the thin, brittle, almost translucent skin that the dish is famous for. Ask which method a house uses and you will learn more about your meal than the menu will tell you.
Slicing and the table
A proper duck is carved in front of you. The carver takes the skin first, in thin slices, and serves it with sugar or with a light dipping sauce so that it can be eaten on its own; the meat follows in slices with a little fat attached, and the bones and remaining meat are usually taken away to be made into a soup or a stir-fry, which arrives later in the meal. It is eaten wrapped in thin pancakes with spring onion, cucumber and sweet bean sauce. A whole duck serves about three or four people as part of a larger meal, and most houses will also sell half a bird. Expect the duck to be priced per bird rather than per person.
The bill and the ordering
Beyond the duck, the charge is mostly in the side dishes, which in a full-service duck house are priced like a normal restaurant and can easily cost more than the bird itself. The famous names trade on their queues, their branch count and their view; smaller houses in the same neighbourhood often serve an equally good duck with a shorter wait. Book a day ahead for dinner at any well-known address, and expect the first sitting to be the calmest. Duck houses are used to foreign visitors, most have picture menus, and the carving and wrapping need no translation.
