The Food Chain is structured around a simple idea: each chef we profile selects the next. This week we spoke to the larger-than-life Beijing chef endlessly iterating the city’s most iconic dish.
Peking duck has been evolving for centuries, but one of its most consequential leaps came in December 2000. That was the month that a tall chef from Beijing applied for Chinese patent CN 1307835A, codifying a new method he had been working on for more than a decade.
Today, Dong Zhenxiang—known in China as Da Dong for his height (“da” = big) and perhaps also for his outsized personal style—is one of China’s most revered chefs, with dozens of restaurants across the country. Da Dong, also the name of his Michelin-starred Beijing flagship, has become synonymous with Peking duck.
It was the Peking duck at Da Dong that caught the attention of last week’s featured chef, Andrew Wong. “The skin is like honeycomb, but it’s like lacquered honeycomb,” Wong told R&K’s Matt Goulding. “And you tell me how you get fatty animal skin that had feathers on it to then become lacquered, juicy, sweet, duck-flavored honeycomb.”
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