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Please note, Duck Duck Goose has now closed. Time Out Food editors, March 2019.
The teeny-tiny interior of this Cantonese café, just off Pop Brixton’s buzzy central area (or clamorous first circle of hell, your choice) is very cute. Mahjong dice line the door. The walls are made from that Swiss-cheese pegboard you see in rural art shops. Giant plastic fruit hang around the space. Pastel shades abound across a sea of Formica. It’s quirky. I loved it.
As I did most of the food. First, the big hitters. Go now for their prawn toast. It is epic. Gobstopper-sized mounds of light prawn mousse are wodged on to sesame-covered bread, fried into submission and covered in bonito tuna flakes, bitter frisée lettuce and pickled kohlrabi. Then zip forward an hour to the cha chaan teng French toast – a fried peanut-butter sandwich by another name. Elvis, understandably, died for this. It was paired with a painfully good, kulfi-dense peanut and soy ice cream. For these two dishes alone, Duck Duck Goose would be a worthy entry on any end-of-year ‘best of’ list.
And the rest? Pretty great, but – and it’s a big ‘but’ – almost all over-salted. A plate of crunchy pork belly, roast duck and sliced char siu, swimming in drinkable sweet soy juices, was fab but for the intense sodium levels; likewise a dish of pork ribs with fermented tofu and wild garlic. Wok-fried greens should have been a fresh, chilli-smacked foil to both, but again. Alas!
Fingers crossed they correct this simple mistake, as the cooking is on point otherwise; the pared-down menu thoughtfully crafted and the cocktails decent. Either way, it’s well worth braving Brixton’s drunken yuppie masses to get your beak around those toasts.