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9 0 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 5.14 dine in WITH Mary Welp W hen my friend Lin (one of several book addicts in my life) asked where I wanted to meet for din- ner last month, I said, "Have you tried Joy Luck yet?" She, believing I was making a joke about the best-selling Amy Tan novel, said, "Ha, ha. Yeah. About 25 years ago." I wasn't joking. And though I might read Te Joy Luck Club a second time (but defnitely not a third), I would happily go every night of the week to the restaurant on Bardstown Road named after it. In fact, I pretty much did that in the frst two weeks after I discovered it. Joy Luck (in the space formerly housing Kash- mir Indian Restaurant before it moved two doors down the street) has the kind of limited Asian menu I've been in search of my whole adult life. Instead of going on for pages, you get just one page containing all of the starters, soups, entrées and desserts. As a bonus, you get a seriously decent wine, beer and craft-cocktail list, a phe- nomenon nearly unknown to traditional Chinese restaurants. Before receiving the menu, you'll surmise that Joy Luck is an atypical space. Te interior looks and feels more Scandy-calm than Chinese-hectic. It's clean, woody and spare — sunny in the day- time, incandescently lit by night. A few purist friends visiting from New York and Chicago took to dissing the menu before even trying the food. To them, any place that of- fers the fusion of "Kimchi Quesadilla" could not possibly be authentic. But that was before they tasted the Formosa chicken roll appetizer (a fried soy wrap flled with zesty chopped chicken and aromatic herbs and spices). I tell you, I watched this chicken roll win over some serious die-hards. Despite the yumminess of — the joy in — all dishes sampled, it's the Beijing roast duck that we all keep going back for. In line with the non- traditional, innovative vibe of the place, the duck does not arrive at the table as a whole bird, sliced on a platter. Instead, it arrives on a small plate in two crisped quarters neatly sliced, along with pancakes, scallions and colorful pickled veg- etables. Te pancakes, rather than the fat taste- less papery slices that come pre-made at many restaurants to accompany moo shu, are billed as "tortillas" but are more like the consistency of the dough used to make pork buns. Tey are warm and chewy and fll you up enough for two people to share the duck dish as an entrée. But now the time has come to tell the truth for the home cook. Preparing a Beijing (or Peking) duck in your own kitchen is almost as much trouble as digging a hole to China. If you search online or in old cookbooks, you will fnd as many diferent tricks of the trade as there are provinces in the People's Republic. Quite a few require you to go out and buy a meat hook. Some even instruct you to blow air into the bird by using a bicycle pump! I am not making this up. All in- volve the three-step, two-day process of simmer- ing the bird, letting it dry out, and then roasting it (pan-free) in a way that is sure to set of most smoke alarms. I have experimented and experimented, and I still always end up with a fatty, chewy duck and a mess that takes even longer to clean up than it did to make in the frst place. My solution has been one suggested long ago by the clever food writer Jacques Pépin: Leave the duck-roasting to the great Chinese restaurants. At home, do up a chicken in the Peking man- ner. Te ease of Pepin's recipe (which I came across, by the way, around the same time as I frst read Amy Tan) allows you to focus more on the accompaniments: the pancakes, the sliced vegetables, the sauces. While we're on the subject, many Chinese pan- cake recipes online are almost as complicated to conjure as the duck itself. So I have come up with a compromise between the "pork bun tortilla" and the papery discs. Te recipe below produces something more like a foolproof crepe. Save time, too, by picking up a bottle of plum or salty-sweet hoisin sauce at your neighborhood grocery; or, for an extra dimension of contrasting favor, try the plum sauce below that is a version of any good grandmother's plum jelly. Tus you can either make this Beijing dinner at home in a way that is less troublesome or, as my friend Ann likes to say, you can "make dinner possible" by taking your friends out to Joy Luck. BEIJING BIRDS OF A FEATHER Try Joy Luck for duck, but be practical with chicken at home. Beijing Roasted Chicken 1 chicken (3½ to 4 pounds), prefer- ably free-range 1½ teaspoons honey 1 tablespoon soy sauce ½ teaspoon Tabasco sauce Place a pot containing three quarts of water over high heat. When the water comes to a boil, lower the chicken into the water (it should be completely im- mersed). Cook the chicken for about a total of 10 minutes. (It will take about fve minutes for the water to return to the boil, and the chicken should cook for an additional four or fve minutes at a gentle boil.) Drain the chicken and place it on a rack, uncovered, in the refrigerator for fve to six hours, or overnight. Te skin should be somewhat dry at this point. (Te drier the skin, the crisper it will be after cooking.) At cooking time, combine the honey, soy sauce and Tabasco sauce in a small bowl and brush the mixture on all sides of the chicken. Place the chicken, breast side up, on a wire rack in a shallow roasting pan and roast it in a 425-de- gree oven for 20 minutes, or until nicely browned on top. Turn the chicken over (breast side down), return it to the rack and place the pan back in the oven for 30 min- utes. Turn the chicken over again and cook it, breast side up, for an additional 10 minutes, for a total cooking time of one hour. Let the chicken stand at room tem- perature for 10 minutes before carving and serving. Serve the sliced chicken, pancakes and plum sauce along with two bunches of peeled and sliced scallions. Serves four to six. By Mary Welp Illustration by Carrie Neumayer 80-112 BACK.indd 90 4/18/14 11:32 AM