It's Nina's birthday and she wanted to celebrate with dinner out and was kind enough to invite me! Nina is as indecisive as I am and it took some back and forth between logistics with restaurants before she decided where she wanted to go for dinner.
LOCATION: 857 W FULTON MARKET, CHICAGO, IL., 60607
Duck Duck Goat is owned by Stephanie Izard who is the owner of the Little Goat Diner that I wrote about before so I was pretty pumped when Nina picked this place. Her other choice was the restaurant we went to a little while back, Ba Ba Reeba which I would've been pretty cool with but I'm always partial to going somewhere new so it was cool.
Each room in this place is decorated in a different Chinese street food style and it's honestly much bigger on the inside with lots of different rooms. I wanted to walk around just to photograph everything because it looked so great from room to room.
I didn't take pictures of food because as you can see, it was quite dark and it was her birthday so I didn't want to be super awkward with her friend's that I just met and take pictures of the food which we shared family style. Let's see if I can remember everything we got because with 7 of us sharing we tried quite a bit of everything.
We started off with some goat and duck spring rolls and the sichuan pork boiled dumplings. I never know how I feel about spring rolls because sometimes they're fried and sometimes they're more like 'summer rolls' which are what I think of when someone says spring rolls. They were indeed fried and skinny little things but tasted pretty good. The dumplings were great and were moist and flavorful. Nothing too out of the ordinary so far, but still good.
Nina and I are always about octopus so of course we had to order the cold octopus, cucumber, and peanut salad which i've never heard of or had before but loved. I always love octopus so I was pretty hyped for this and it didn't disappoint. It wasn't a huge serving so between 7 of us I got about a bite and wish I had more for sure.
For noodles we got the shrimp and goat sausage slap noodles (a special here) as well as the goat belly lo mein both of which were good but, again, nothing out of the ordinary. the lo mein was a little salty which tends to happen and not my favorite kind of noodles because they feel somewhat americanized to me. We were pretty excited about ordering a lot of goat dishes because of the name of the restaurant and feels like a treat to me because I don't get it often.
Finally, we ordered duck fried rice which has a duck egg over jasmine rice as well as seafood fried rice which had shrimp, clams, and sea bass. Both were good with a nice balance of flavor and not too much salt. I'd say the seafood fried rice was a bigger hit but that's not to say we didn't finish every grain of duck fried rice we were given. We also got an order of green beans in black bean sauce which tasted great. It had that wok taste to it so I could tell they did it right and just reminded me of when dad makes me green beans at home.
It's pretty impressive that the dishes tasted really authentic and makes me wonder who the actual chefs were because they did their research and did a great job. This is also to say that while the dishes were all tasty, they weren't too out of the ordinary over all, and I felt like I could get the same food from an authentic chinese restaurant in chinatown for at least a third of the price. I wouldn't go back just for that fact alone but it was a good experience and the interiors made me pretty excited so at least there's that. They also have a really cute take out window on the outside of the building which apparently has a slightly different menu from the sit down menu which is a fun twist but I'm not sure that it's as popular because a big part of eating at duck duck goat was for the atmosphere.