Just when I thought that I would struggle to squeeze any new epicurean pleasures out of my final months at Penn, I discovered Zinc. Admittedly, the name is slightly frustrating. We want our French bistros to sound, well, French. Brasserie Perrier, Parc and even the obnoxiously neon Bistro St. Tropez resonate with our inner Gaul before we even arrive. Zinc?
However, to enter the intimate dining room and be greeted by the impossibly French Chef/Owner Olivier Destmartin is to step through a portal to the back streets of Paris. Destmartin’s menu suggests he is a chef who knows what he’s doing, featuring sweetbreads, pig’s trotters, calves liver and escargots. And he does.
The Cassolette d’escargots with butternut squash and almonds in a brown butter garlic sauce ($10) is a textural orgy of nutty, chewy, creamy delectability where each ingredient shines through impressively. The poached egg over potato and leek pancake with Avruga caviar cream sauce ($10) is — but for an overhelping of underwhelming caviar — almost as magnificent as it sounds. The one disappointment was the Chevre Chaud en Salade ($9). Served in a pastry casing, the goat cheese is blended in-house with a mix of garlic and herbs and served lukewarm. A simple slab of chevre blanc, hot and oozing over a slice of toast, would have made us much happier.
In truth, we had been lured to Zinc for one reason — the pressed duck, a mid-19th century method of serving duck in which the entire carcass is pressed, tableside, in an awe-inspiring silver machine that resembles a torture device. Chef Destmartin tells us of the dish’s glorious history as he goes about the process of carving, crushing and reducing. The point is to extract every drop of juice and flavor from the bird to produce a gravy fit for kings.
The breasts are served first, accompanied by roast potatoes and covered generously with the jus. The meat, from wild Normandy ducks, is richly red and intensely gamey. The skin, surprisingly lean for such a plump specimen, is perfectly crisp. The whole dish is truly exquisite.
Having been broiled further, the legs and wings are returned for the second service, plated simply with a house salad. Still excellent in quality, they were unfortunately un peu over-done for our liking.
The entire Zinc experience is the pinnacle of dining theatrics; the duck press plays into our destructive, childlike fantasies in the most sophisticated of ways. Zinc may stand out for its peculiar name, but it is for its seriously good French food — and its duck in particular — that you will remember it.
Zinc 246 S. 11th St. (215) 351-9901 Don’t Miss: The pressed duck Skip: The Chevre Chaud en salade
