Name: KIOSK Budapest
Address: Budapest, Március 15. tér 4, HU
Telephone: 06 70 585 5727
Price range: €€€
Rating: 4.3

Hungary

KIOSK Budapest

France

Canard à la presse is a duck dish built around a piece of equipment: a roasted bird is carved at the table, and its carcass is crushed in a silver duck press to extract the blood and marrow, which are then whisked into a sauce of the duck's own liver, cognac and wine and poured over the sliced breast. It is the signature of La Tour d'Argent in Paris, which has served it under the name canard au sang since the 1890s and numbers every duck, past the million mark by the early 2000s, handing the diner a card with the number. The dish is one of the last survivors of tableside haute cuisine, performed by a maître d'hôtel in a dining room rather than a cook in a kitchen, and the press itself, a vertical screw in a cast and plated housing, has become a collector's object. A handful of restaurants in France, London and New York keep the service alive, and most of them have had to design their own press.

The duck is a specific one: a young Challans or Rouen duck, strangled rather than bled so the blood stays in the meat, and roasted hot for only about twenty minutes so the breast is rare. At the table the legs are removed and sent back to the kitchen to be grilled and served as a second course; the breast is sliced thin and kept warm on a plate over a flame. The carcass, with the trimmings and often the raw liver, is broken up and put into the press, and the screw is turned until the blood and juices run out of the spout into a pan. In that pan the liver has already been pounded with a reduction of red wine or port, cognac, lemon and a little consommé; the pressed juices go in, the sauce is whisked over the flame for several minutes until it thickens by the coagulation of the blood and takes on a glossy, dark red-brown colour, and it is spooned over the breast. The whole operation takes a quarter of an hour in front of the guest.

Judge the sauce, because it is the dish: it should be thick enough to coat the slices and the back of a spoon, smooth with no grainy curdled blood, deep mahogany in colour, and taste of liver, wine and the iron of the duck with a lift of lemon and cognac at the end, rich enough that a small quantity is enough. The breast should be rare to pink and sliced thin, warm but not re-cooked by the sauce. Mark down a sauce that has split or gone grainy from being heated too hard, a sauce that is thin because the press yielded little, a breast that is grey from over-roasting or has been held too long over the flame, a sauce that tastes mainly of wine, and a version made in the kitchen with no press and no blood, which is a duck with a liver sauce and should be named as such. The grilled legs that follow are judged on their own: skin crisp, meat fully cooked, with a mustard sauce or a salad.

Canard à la presse

Great autmosper! Great food! I definitely recommend beef cheeks and duck breast and olives 🫒 

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