Four fat quails belling a mesquite tree.
Some of the meat and fish in other dishes — the raw tuna in a riff on nachos with a rich avocado cream; quail in an appetizer salad jazzed up with bacon — reflect earnest concern with ingredients.
On a recent evening, a rich allotment of quail and bacon (from "a guy in Tennessee with a couple of pigs," the waiter said) came atop a bed of luscious grits.
Wine geeks will love the interesting list with many sustainable bottles; the lucky will go on a night when Duca's extraordinarily rich tourte of quail breast, foie gras, and shitake mushrooms, baked in pastry and served with beef jus, is one of the specials.
I enjoyed a special of two quartered whole quail, meaty, rich and faintly gamy, in a dense brown demi-glace strewn with black peppercorns and wild mushrooms.
Then monkfish tempura, light, lovely and perfectly fried; foie gras and eel terrine, which was rich but hardly startling; and quail with foie gras (one of my companions was a foie gras freak), something of a cliché.
Game birds, such as quail stuffed with veal, and grilled venison have deep and rich flavors, although they are a bit tough.
Much of what follows involves fancy ingredients foisted on one another, as in monkfish liver topped with sea urchin topped with salmon roe, a blandly rich-on-rich-on-rich little tower rising from a pool of chile yuzu sauce thickened with (too much) quail egg.
The meatballs get a more vital assist from a quail egg, whose yolk, once broken, gives them a rich, silken gloss.
Can we please go back to sauce?) Poached and roasted quail wrapped round melting-away foie gras was a rich choice, lifted by braised red cabbage.
