Just Ducky

Le Canard Enchainé

by Brian K. Mahoney and photographs by Matt Petricone, July 29, 2008

On a recent visit to Le Canard Enchainé, I ordered the shrimp Indochine, one of the day’s specials, on a lark. As I normally gravitate toward the trustworthy classics at Le Canard—duck confit, snails in garlic butter, omelets—I was unsure what to expect from the bistro’s fusion cuisine. Displaying a lot of height, with petite breadsticks and a spring of thyme, the butterflied shrimp on skewers were decorated with nasturtiums, strawberries, and pickled ginger atop a bed of sweet, sticky rice and outlying sauce pools with notes of plum, coconut, wasabi, soy, and orange.

At a neighboring table, a woman I just had been introduced to by the restaurant’s gregarious owner, Jean-Jacques Carquillat, marveled at the composition, then mock-complained that she had ordered the same dish earlier in the week, but it had been served sans flowers. Without skipping a beat,Carquillat reassured her in his rough-accented English, “But of course, you were the flower.” The woman, a Lebanese breast surgeon who told me she was moving to Las Vegas to helm its first breast-surgery clinic, then asked me if she could take a picture of my food with her cell phone.

Welcome to Le Canard Enchainé (literal translation: “the chained duck”), where the owner prowls the floor like a jovial French bear throwing a never-ending dinner party. Carquillat constantly greets the faithful, making sure the plates come out of the kitchen in perfect form (when he’s not cooking; Carquillat is also the executive chef), pouring wine, working the room, and introducing diners across tables. While some French restaurants tend toward austerity in food, service, and décor, (a rigor that can lead to rigor mortis), Le Canard is a decidedly unfussy place, casual in its manners but not its food. You can order a salad as an entrée and not be looked at askance, as if you were a cheapskate squatting on prime real estate. No meal I’ve had at Le Canard has ever been rushed—even when dining late on a Sunday night—and I’ve been made to feel as welcome in shorts as in a suit. Le Canard is a prêt-à-porter kind of place—nothing too daring or fancy, but always in fashion.

One of the defining features of a meal at Le Canard is the service. While some of the younger waiters can be a bit shaky on the particulars of the wine list—intimidating if you don’t know French wine—the attitude of the staff is helpful and charming, a quality Carquillat says he demands from his staff. “When you walk in the place, you feel like you’re welcome, like you become a friend,” he said. “You’re not just a number. To me, that’s the number-one issue, and it’s what I teach my staff. That’s why my key asset is my mother-in-law, Elisabeth.”

(Ah, Elisabeth. Anyone who’s ever been to Le Canard more than once knows the smiling short-haired blond who is Carquillat’s mother-in-law. If you’ve been there once, she’ll recognize you the second time around and greet you with a lively bonjour and a kiss on both cheeks.)