The aesthetics of this place here at Circular Quay don't look much- in fact, so much of a charming little diner is this that were you not browsing around the eateries and restaurants along the road, or if you weren't looking for this place, you might possibly have missed it entirely.
I can't be sure the name of the place.
It's not on Google Maps, but it lies not too far from South Bridge Road, so I think it has to be somewhere between Circular House, and Thien Long Vietnamese Restaurant.
The draw of this place has to be their lunch sets.
Again I can't quite remember just what of the sets they have on their menu, but there's tomato and egg, there's fried rice, and there's this Qingdao noodles that at first glance caught my eye but till date I have yet to try.
We were there this particular evening for the Peking Duck.
Which, if one must know, is significantly different from the Cantonese-style Peking Duck that I have eaten at other places, and which I appreciate and love.
That doesn't mean that the duck here isn't good.
On the contrary it has a bit of a northern feel about it, defined quite easily by the earthiness of the colors and the simple, yet wholesomeness the food gives.
Peking Duck here is not fanciful but casual, very much like the kind of place that you'd have just by 'going downstairs'. The diner is not a place where you feel obligated to dress up, nor is the food served on crockery and cutlery glimmery and shiny elaborate with shiny colors red and gold.
I felt like I were having a meal in a person's home.
Maybe it had something to do with how the food came arranged.
Neat and structured, everything came served on a platter that might well have been someone's dinner tray in a university canteen or an industrial factory canteen.
On one section you had the duck skin (and meat) all piled up in a sort of pillar shape. Next to it there were the leeks, celery stems, sweet plum sauce, and- surprise of surprise- sugar. Then at the corner, in the bamboo basket there were the crepes, which, again, were not the egg kind that you have served to you at Cantonese-style restaurants.
These were the literal doughy (maybe sorghum wheat) kind- the same kind you'd have if you were eating guo tie or jiao zis.
My style of having this duck was to, pretty much, slide the duck into the crepe, dip it into the sweet sauce, and eat.
By right you were supposed to stick the leeks and the other vegetables into the same single crepe, but I decided I'd snack on them separately.
The part of this dish that surprised me the most was the sugar.
I had, up till now, never had had sugar with my Peking Duck.
And I did not know where exactly I was supposed to put it, so I simply tried celery, with sugar.
Let's just say it did not go well.