It's not like people needed another reason to go to Duckfat. Since it opened about a year ago, the new venture of Rob Evans and Nancy Pugh, vastly more casual than their Hugo’s, has done a hopping lunch business — primarily thanks to their delicious panini and Belgian fries. With soups, terrific salads, desserts, beer, and wine, Duckfat has been a viable option for a casual dinner too. But many fewer people seem to visit Duckfat in the evening, and I have been surprised to stop by there on a Friday or Saturday night and find it easy to grab a seat, even with a large party.
Perhaps in an effort to change that, Duckfat has recently begun to offer a special dinner menu on weekends. When I first glimpsed the new menu, which changes weekly, it appeared to be an eclectic mix of appetizers and small entrees - a significant departure from their regular fare. I was very curious to see what Pugh and Evans would come up with that was somewhere between Duckfat’s sandwiches and the hyper-experimental (and expensive) food at Hugo’s.
But Duckfat seems to have gone in a third direction. On our visit the weekend specials were hearty, relatively straightforward, and left us a little under-whelmed. One of Duckfat’s charms has always been its unabashed embrace of the fat that helps make its pressed sandwiches and fries taste so good. But by extending that principle to the entrees, they seemed to offer dishes that uniformly favored richness over inventiveness with flavor.
This is not to say the specials were bad. It was easy to detect many of the qualities — terrific ingredients prepared on-site from scratch — that make the panini so good. Though on one level, the richness was very satisfying, the dishes seemed to hit the same note too often. After a while, it started to become cloying, soaking up flavors rather than presenting them.
I feel certain, for example, that the duck on the duck rillete crostini had been carefully and lovingly slow-roasted for countless hours before being served to us on little toasts. But it seemed the duck had been allowed to disintegrate in its own oils for too long — resulting in muted flavors, and a consistency a little like chunk tuna. It came with a parsnip puree that offered a touch of Hugo’s-type inventiveness and halves of cipolini onions — which in contrast to the duck had been roasted just enough, keeping their sweetness and some crispness.
The merguez sausage was really quite good — crumbly, but not dry, little pillows of lamb and seasonings. It was served on white beans in a slightly sweet sauce that had something of the color of industrial mac and cheese. A gnocchi was pillowy as well — too much so, however, and did not compare well to the wonderful crispy-yet-runny version found on the dinner and breakfast menus of Mim's and Front Room. The herb ravioli filled with potato was a little mushy and indistinctive.
