The Joy Duck Club

Anyone who has ever worked in the restaurant business has had a love-hate relationship with hectic “special occasion” nights like Valentine’s Day, which is traditionally one of the busiest nights for the food-service industry. A lot of diners venture out on such nights expecting culinary and service theatrics — but those are also notoriously busy evenings when many restaurants are overbooked and understaffed, their kitchens on hyperdrive, turning out meals the way GM cranks out Prizms. Under those circumstances, even the best restaurant can give a second-rate impression.

But a handful of fancy restaurants — the American, EBT, Café Allegro, to name a few — treat every night as though it were a special occasion: The ambience is elegant, the service polished, the menu intelligent and sophisticated. No restaurant consistently excels at all of those elements like the Peppercorn Duck Club. The food snobs I know rarely mention this 21-year-old institution when they’re blathering on about the newest and hottest places. So many other restaurants have opened in the last two decades that the dining room on the Hyatt Regency’s second level — once a major draw to the Crown Center complex — has gone from being one of Esquire‘s “100 best new restaurants” to being nearly forgotten.

“It was so incredible when it opened,” remembers my friend John, one of the restaurant’s original waiters. “Anyone who was anyone ate there. Everyone! High-society snobs, visiting dignitaries, even the lady who writes the ‘Dear Abby’ column!”

John thinks the 1981 collapse of the Hyatt Regency’s skywalks permanently tarnished the glamour that had surrounded the Peppercorn Duck Club. But the hotel’s food-and-beverage director begs to differ. “The Peppercorn Duck Club’s popularity helped put the hotel back on the map,” says the personable Nassy Saidian, who started his career as a host at the restaurant in 1982. “Even when people weren’t staying in the hotel, they came to eat at the Duck Club.”

Twenty years later, the place still has a potent allure, even though it could use a facelift and a live pianist instead of tinny piped-in music.

“It’s elevator music! So ordinary,” complained my gorgeous friend Carmen. We were squeezed into a cozy banquette that faced out onto the spacious dining room, which gets periodic fabric and carpet makeovers but still has too many relics of Reagan-era “style,” such as shiny brass trim, ghastly light fixtures and even uglier artwork.

Carmen, who works in the beauty trade, couldn’t understand how the Peppercorn Duck Club could be so attuned to exquisite little touches — fresh flowers on each table, gold-embossed matchbooks personalized for each table’s host, a sumptuous coffee service straight out of the Ottoman empire — while ignoring the big picture.

“I love the big dessert display and the brass rotisserie,” Carmen said, “but everything else is pure airport lounge. Except him.”

The him was a tall, broad-shouldered, wasp-waisted, dark-haired European manager who handed us menus (Carmen took hers as if she were accepting an Oscar), bowed slightly and stepped away. Carmen unfolded her napkin and gave me a sly look. “Now that’s the kind of décor every restaurant needs.”

When it comes to service, few restaurants (and even fewer hotel dining rooms) can match the seamless attention that the veteran staff at the Duck Club gives each table. Some of the waiters have been working the room since it opened — and it wasn’t intended to be a refined “club” as much as an orgy of good eating. Until last year, the lavish “Market Island” display in the center of the dining room offered a combination of prepared cold salads (including a dungeness crab concoction that I still crave) and chilled appetizers. Saidian stopped setting out that spread at dinner (“Fewer people were choosing it,” he says. “We did a survey”), but it is still a popular lunch destination; I sampled almost everything on it one lazy afternoon and waddled out in a stupor induced by fresh mozzarella, smoked salmon and roasted-duck salad.

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The restaurant’s new dinner menu includes more hot appetizers and creative salads; the latter present the house specialty — roast duck — as either a faux prosciutto on crackly baked pita or layered in a savory Napoleon between layers of sweet-potato wafers and spinach. In one Moroccan-inspired appetizer, shrimp swam in an aromatic Chermoula sauce, its tawny surface flecked with cilantro, chopped garlic and cumin. We sopped up the remaining sauce with the airy but oddly flavorless “honey dough” balls that we pulled out from under a generous heap of “microherbs” (baby arugula in this case, looking like a jumble of four-leaf clovers).

Another slightly Arabic touch was the minty green salad, doused in a snappy vinaigrette of lemon juice and dried sumac and sweetened with a splash of rice vinegar. It consisted of enough microherbs to fill a small greenhouse, and we scooped them up with pita wedges.

Fat chunks of meat floated in a bowl of mahogany-colored lobster bisque, richly scented with brandy. Carmen pushed the bowl away after the third sip. “If I took another bite,” she said, “I’d have to say au revoir to my duck.”

And that would have been a crime. The restaurant’s signature dish, a full-breasted beauty, the dark flesh hot and succulent under a crispy sheath of translucent amber skin, arrives with great drama. Three sauces accompany it to the table: a piquant peppercorn, a tart pink raspberry and a glossy honey-almond.

“It’s a very sensual dish,” said Carmen, almost blushing. “You must taste it!”

I looked up to see if anyone was watching us, then reached over and procured a juicy bit of the meat for myself. But not too much, for I couldn’t be unfaithful to my own golden honey-glazed hunk of roasted pheasant with a stuffing of shiitake mushrooms and lobster-flecked cornbread. Who cares about the décor? I thought. At the Duck Club, the sex appeal is all on the plate.

Maybe that’s why chef Jeff Rowley has been allowed to add some spicy new dishes to a repertoire which in the past had veered away from anything too ethnic or too fiery. For example, the new chick on the block, a duck tamale, is drenched in a smoldering red chili sauce. And a plate of chili-rubbed shrimp came coyly arranged like can-can dancers on a mound of mildly seasoned chorizo hash, a riot of chopped cilantro, tender potato and cool tomato.

After all that, dessert would seem anticlimactic. But the Ultra Chocolatta Bar is included in the dinner prices (which are surprisingly nonthreatening, by the way), and Carmen, eager to throw herself upon it, did a provocative cha-cha down the steps to the brassy center display. Waiting there were custom-tailored cakes layered with whipped cream or fluffy mousse or boasting spun-sugar halos or raspberry chapeaus. Even if the place were redecorated, nothing on the walls could compete with the visual extravagance on the chocolate bar: cream puffs swirled in shiny fondant, a dense “Sin Cake” glistening with sugar crystals, a molten puddle of hot brownie pudding bubbling in a silver vat and anticipating a coat of warm vanilla sauce.

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I tried to be discreet as I wandered around the exhibition, plucking up a macaroon here or a dollop of fluffy tiramisu there. Already back at the table, Carmen was agog at the bounty of sweet treasures that accompanied a cup of coffee: orange rind peeled like swirls of ribbon, a cloud of Kahlua-flavored whipped cream, a pile of shaved chocolate, cinnamon sticks, a fresh orchid.

“Can you imagine that there are restaurants that still do all these things?” asked Carmen. “I thought such attention to detail had gone out of style.”

Not at this congenial club. After I paid our bill, the host handed me my receipt and gave Carmen a long-stemmed red rose. “I feel so special,” she giggled.

But it wasn’t a special occasion, I reminded her. At the Peppercorn Duck Club, even an icy Wednesday night is reason for celebration.