Spice China

When your duck is done cooking, the fun starts. The skin should be removed (carefully) using a very sharp knife, stretched across the cutting board and sliced into thin, crispy strips, sometimes juiced with a sugar/garlic sauce. Then the breasts — damp with melted duck fat, as tender as a lobe of foie — must be removed whole and sliced, ideally with the shape of the breast preserved. The legs are chopped clean from the body and placed bone-in on the tray alongside sauce, pancakes, the obligatory vegetables and the deconstructed duck: skin on top, breast below. At the very least, it is a two- or three-day process to get a Peking duck just right. Most modern Chinese restaurants knock 'em out in about an hour, pan-roasting the bird and then serving it chopped up like hash.

But not at Spice China. Chef Jack Mok takes two days to prepare his ducks. And while I don't think he has a time machine in the back, an original Chinese brick oven or a direct line to a Nanjing duck supplier, only the most freaky, annoying purist would ever notice. He serves his three-legged ducks the right way: a full breast, expertly deboned and sliced with a flashy double-cut that makes for about a hundred bite-sized (or pancake-sized) pieces, topped with shingled strips of crisp, sweet, smoky duck skin the color of caramel candy. And in a sop to completely piggish duck junkies like me, he also tops the breast with a flap of fatty skin that's perfect for chewing after it's dipped in the cup of super-sweet and nutty, savory, smoky, chocolate-brown hoisin sauce.

There are also the traditional scallions and batonnet-cut sticks of cucumber for flavor and texture contrast, but as I do with those Buffalo wing celery sticks, I ignored them completely — instead crunching strips of sweetened duck skin like potato chips made of flesh, folding handfuls of duck meat inside thin pancakes slathered in sauce, grinning like an idiot. Before I was done, I'd consumed the equivalent of half a duck, plus an extra leg, washing it down with cold Tsingtao beer and shots of jasmine tea — devouring the object of my affections, my fanatical searching, before the meat had even grown cold.

Not that it mattered much to me, but Spice China does more than just Peking duck. In fact, Peking duck barely rises to the level of a house specialty at this huge, multi-purpose treasure chest of kooky Asiana, being listed dead last on a page that offers specials of Hunanese chicken and scallions with black pepper, peasant hot pot with tofu, bok choy and Chinese mushrooms, and (amazingly) a super-traditional five-spice Chinese pork that arrives at the table like something out of a cartoon: an entire pork shank — an entire ham — served bone-in, skin-on, slow-roasted and rubbed-down with Chinese five-spice powder until it has achieved the texture of fine barbecue and a flavor that's like eating the steam rising over a Shanghai spice market. And that's just one page of this remarkable menu — one of eighteen.

At Spice China, Mok and his crew have essentially created two menus: one full of sesame beef and a really delicious orange-peel chicken, great handmade pork dumplings, wonton soup and mu shu everything, then a secondary menu that subtly pushes the more authentic cuisine of China and Shanghai on the unsuspecting or the brave. Here, the kitchen offers chilled plates of marinated jellyfish; beef tripe marinated in oil, garlic and onions that's served as a cold app; chicken marinated in wine; and duck packed in salt. Sometimes the staff (friendly, if slightly inept — like an entire crew imported from the closest Applebee's and suddenly made to sell Chinese radish soup and shrimp poppers) will say that the kitchen is out of these specialties. Sometimes, inexplicably, the kitchen just won't prepare them. But be persistent. Patience pays off.

And in the meantime, there's always the bourbon steak — a strange Chinese-American dish that has followed a process of reverse-assimilation, having first been popularized in China as a knockoff of an American dish, then moving back across the ocean to be served here as a Chinese classic. There are whole fish (striped bass, steamed or fried) and eel spiced with white pepper; delicious Shanghai-style shrimp, cooked in the shell and tossed with a creamy ginger sauce; and one of my new comfort-food addictions: sliced tofu, sliced prosciutto and gnarled bits of poached chicken tossed together, stir-fried and served in a huge, shallow bowl with a delicate ginger, lemon, clove and cilantro sauce.

Someday, when I leave Denver and go gallivanting over the horizon to come-what-may, I have no doubt that this will be among the dishes that I crave, that I search for, that becomes a new fixation as I haunt the strip malls and steamy alleys of wherever I end up, chasing after a Shanghainese flavor, dimly remembered, that I had once in a dining room in Louisville, Colorado.

The same place where I finally found my ideal Peking duck.