“Duck really is the other pork, isn’t it?” my friend Cathy asked last week. And of course, she’s right. The two animals meander aimlessly around the barnyard, grazing and grunting and generally acting like hungry teenagers. But all the while they are building up a formidable cushion of sweet fat that has the miraculous quality of improving just about any food it touches.

No wonder Momofuku Ssam Bar settled on duck as a focus for its lunch menu last spring. That restaurant didn’t come into its own until it introduced its bo ssam dinners, where groups can feast on a whole pork shoulder slowly roasted until it is as spoonable and irresistible as cake frosting. What do you do after you’ve started a citywide pork frenzy? Rotisserie duck wouldn’t strike everybody as the obvious answer, but it’s the one that occurred to Ryan Miller, Ssam’s chef de cuisine. Whole roast ducks are served to groups, bo ssam-style, but the solo diner can get a few slices in a bowl with rice and watercress. And the Ssam Bar team took advantage of this great new supply of cooking fat to come up with a few other duck-centric menu items. In the early days, the restaurant called this its Duckaholic Lunch, but that name seems to have passed out of use.

Meanwhile, in an apparently unrelated development, Simpson Wong was developing a menu for Wong, his Asian restaurant across town on Cornelia Street. One of the things he came up with is the Duckavore Dinner, a six-course meal featuring duck in every course. In the course of exploring Wong’s menu for this week’s restaurant review, I did a Duckavore, which requires 48 hours’ notice. Once I’d scheduled it, I realized that I had the kind of opportunity that doesn’t come along very often: I could have a multi-course duck lunch at Ssam Bar, then a multi-course duck dinner at Wong. (I no longer remember what I did in between the two meals. Presumably I waddled between the East and West Village in a kind of fugue state, quacking softly to myself.) Read more…