Ted goes quackers ...

When we were growing up my 2.5 siblings and I spent a lot of time with our grandparents on their farm.  Our grandfather was always showing us new things, and we had all sorts of adventures of discovery with him.  One day he told my sister to go up to the hay barn and there she would find a surprise.  When she arrived she found a small (O)possum asleep on a bale of hay.  She went over quietly and picked it up.  The possum grabbed her and she grabbed it back and they stood there for the longest time not knowing what to do or how to disentangle without bloodshed being involved.  Suddenly a duck quacked loudly, and startled, they let go of one another. My sister stalked back to the farm house and accosted our grandfather for exposing her to a wild animal.  He said “what a duck on a nest of eggs?” … yes the possum was a barn interloper and the duck had saved the day.

Sister to Rawduck restaurant in the trendy east London, Ducksoup is a tiny little restaurant in Soho, sharing the same philosophy and approach to food and wine as its sibling ie real food stuff they like from mainly the UK, France, and Italy, and a bent for “natural” wines.

… let me just get the burning question out of the way upfront - there’s no duck soup on the menu.  The daily menu offers a small range of mouth-watering options of plainly described (as opposed to flowery dribble over statement found on many menus) seasonal produce, so enticing, that you soon forget all about soup. I started with a plate of chopped flat peaches (the ones that look like tiny fruity Martian spaceships), with parmesan and basil, drizzled with a fabulous olive oil.

So simple, and yet so delicious, letting each ingredient speak for itself and be part of a family at the same time. Next I had hand chopped steak with capers and all the things that taste good with steak tartare (by any other name). By this stage of course I just had to have apricot and almond tart with double cream “pudding”, and it was pudding, as opposed to desert.  I now felt suitably replete and rather relaxed.

Ducksoup is the perfect place to have a really good late lunch and do some people watching, while listening to the real vinyl playing soothingly on the real turntable in the background.