Duck Breast (The Elite Cafe, SF)

Pan-Roasted Maple Leaf Farms Duck Breast

The Elite Cafe serves a simply excellent duck breast. Pan-roasted perfectly, it’s sufficiently seared on the outside with that just rare enough ruddiness inside to make it perfectly juicy, tender, and sweet. The duck is an Elite Cafe staple, partnered up with braised winter  greens and sweet potatoes. The greens provide a grounded, earthy balance to the candied sweet potatoes and sweet duck meat, which swims (no pun inherent) in a small pond of its own jus.

The colors on the plate–brown, pink, orange, and dark green–comprise a painterly palette rife with fantasy. It’s a plate that exhibits the strong visual appeal of food in all its dazzling variety. And while the sweet potatoes were candied far too sweetly for my taste, Elite Cafe’s duck breast is still one of the best I’ve had in 2009, a  high recommendation.

Duck Breast, Elite Cafe, SF

The Grade: Excellent

The Damage: $29

The Skinny: The Elite Cafe