Pink Duck
Where: 52 Florida Road
Open: Daily 7am to 11am for breakfast, 11am to 8pm for Pink Duck.
Call: 061 187 8419
A new eatery has opened on Florida Road. Called the Pink Duck, it shares a home with the coffee shop City Roast at the bottom end of the street next to Fresh Flowers International.
The brainchild of Steve Clements, of St Clements fame on the Berea, it is a celebration of Thai flavours that Clements mastered while travelling, and surfing, in Thailand many years ago. There, he fell in love with the food and studied under one the country’s top chefs. By all accounts, she was a tough task master but, nevertheless, she came to the opening in the mid ’ 90s of his first restaurant in Durban, The Chokh Dee, and gave his cooking her wholehearted seal of approval.
The Sheriff of Morningside ‒ so named because even our councillor fears her bark ‒ and I found the only free table during a busy lunch service. Here, you order from the barista at the counter. As we relished good iced coffees (R45), we perused the menu. It has been simplified, after all the kitchen is tiny, but there’s more than enough to entice. And it’s all available for takeaway.
Chicken can be cooked with chilli jam, or pineapple and ginger, or lemon and ginger. Along with beef and prawn options, it can be cooked in a garlic, pepper and chilli sauce, or with chilli and Thai basil. There’s a version with peanut sauce and another with lemon as a stir fry.
Curries can be green or red and take in chicken, beef, prawn, veg and duck options. And then there’s laab, the national dish of Laos, which is a minced meat salad usually served with sticky rice and green papaya. Vegans too have options with plant protein cooked with pineapple and ginger, or chilli and Thai basil, or garlic, pepper, chilli and green beans.
We started with a dish of Siam prawns (R135), a generous portion of prawns cooked in ginger and coriander. This was a mild but beautifully flavourful dish which we mopped up with relish.
The sheriff, not big on the hot stuff, tried the cashew nut chicken with noodles (R79). This was chicken in a sticky-style Asian sauce with plenty of cashews. I enjoyed it. Being at the Pink Duck, I had to try the red duck curry (R145) although, strangely, it is the only duck dish on the menu. Maybe it’s early days. But it was delicious and a real winner. Deeply flavourful with a good hit of chilli, and lovely meltingly unctuous pieces of duck. I relished the last bit of it for lunch the next day.
Desserts are limited to what City Roast has to offer, brownies and biscuits and the like. The famed lime drizzle cake for which St Clements is known had sold out that day. You could also pop into the Glenwood Bakery round the corner for one of its cheese blintzes if nothing appealed. We did pop in for fresh bread, but were more than satisfied. No dessert necessary.
Clements also offers a small range of breakfasts, chalked on a board in the restaurant, until 11am. This included the likes of prosciutto eggs “Benny”, smoked salmon and eggs on toast, or a rice paper omelette, as well as simple dishes like avo and eggs on toast, or French toast with cheese and strawberry jam. Here’s one for the future.
Food: 4
Service: 3
Ambience: 3 ½
The Bill: R449
The Independent on Saturday