My ayi shops at Palace Duck. So does my bao'an. So does the girl who massages my feet, and the guy who's been promising to fix my shower since Christmas. I've seen them all, more than once, lining up outside the single, smeared window. There's probably a formula to predict who'll be there and when, based on paydays, prevailing weather, and the stars. I prefer to guess, to play a kind of Chinese Clue before I turn the corner onto Xiangyang Lu: the traffic warden, on a Tuesday, with the pressure fried duck.

It's always the duck. It’s all they sell. You merely choose how much you want. Figure on half a bird per person, and around 13rmb. Figure also on waiting half an hour or more: all the ducks are done fresh, and their fryers only have room for eight at a time. At noon, and again around 5.30, lines can be twenty people deep. Ignore that voice you hear after about fifteen minutes telling you it's not worth it. That it's cold and there's nothing stopping the guy ahead of you snapping up all of the next batch. Ignore it.



Ducks are the poultry equivalent of the cast of Jersey Shore: laughably greasy, with an ill-hidden layer of fat beneath their pretty plumage (you need it if you're going to spend much of your life on the water). As a consequence, they're usually roasted. Subjecting them to an oil bath seems counter intuitive – fat plus oil logically adds up to grease. But under pressure they're cooked hotter and quicker than in your day-to-day fryer. It's an industrial food trick, taken up by an individual entrepreneur who shares her tiny storefront with a mala tang joint. Skin stays crispy, the excess fat underneath is rendered off, and the pressure keeps the flesh moist and soft. Playing with pressurized oil is dangerous though. Palace Duck's owner won't even allow a phone on site for fear it will distract her cook(s).



A sign by the window, the bottom section worn illegible by a thousand waiting shoulders, speaks to how long they've had to hone their technique. Their first store opened up north in 1866: “Business was brisk, and their fame spread throughout Beijing.” In 1894 they did the catering for the sixtieth birthday banquet of the Empress Dowager Cixi, and “having received the official imperial imprimatur…were no longer permitted to operate publicly.” Times moved on, and this Shanghai branch began serving the public eight years ago. The owner says the recipe -- off-site, the ducks are salted and seasoned with ginger, soy sauce and various "distinctive" herbs for around 10 hours -- remains unchanged.

She's clearly proud of Palace Duck's reputation, of the fact that they change their cooking oil every two days -- better than most, though alone not enough to determine whether the oil will have degraded (she says the recycled cooking oil scandal hasn't affected them) -- and that they sell more than 100 ducks a day. And she insists their trademark pressure frying technique (“explosion frying” if you go by the literal translation of their name, bao kao) is particularly “good for old people.” More likely, everyone just looks older than she remembers by the time they get to the front of the line.



Theirs is a two-man operation. One guy to fry and one guy to stand out back smoking. Every half hour or so he's called upon to serve orders to the waiting line, but he's mainly tasked with smoking. All of the real work is done by the guy on the fryer: Friar Duck, if you will. He lowers the marinated birds into the fryer's 170 degree oil. Down comes the lid, and he moves quickly to screw tight the stoppers, and knock open the pressure valve. Exactly 18 minutes later, he unscrews the stoppers, releases the pressure, shuffles the ducks around, lets them fry for another seven minutes, without pressure, before fishing them out with an oversized fork. The whole process takes just under 30 minutes; all eight ducks sell out within just a few minutes of emerging from the fryer. Hence the wait.





Palace Duck is take-away only. Just you, your duck, and a cardboard tray held half-shut with a rubber band. (Ask politely and you can sit in the adjacent mala tang place.) You tell them how much you want (work in halves or wholes), they weigh it and tell you the price (16.8rmb per 500 grams), wait for the nod from you, then hack it to bits. It's best eaten with fingers. Shanghainese like it straight, no seasoning.



Palace Duck (huanggong baokao ya), 311 Xiangyang Nan Lu, near Yongjia Lu. More details and a map here. Thanks to The Professor for the translation of Palace Duck's signboard.

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