I also loved the crisp duck with a chili and basil sauce ($12.50), which matched heat with flavor in every bite.

Other splendid choices: sweet, tiny Olympia oysters; crab cakes, and in the evening the city's crispest, most delicious duck.

Plum sauce, flavored with chili and ginger, is particularly good with crisp roasted duck laced with soy sauce and honey.

A special of crisp duck, cut in strips and presented atop salad, was a winner.

THE perfect Chinese duck - a duck with rich and tender meat and mahogany skin so crisp that it crackles - is difficult to prepare at home.

Try the crisp duck, lacquered with coffee and vanilla, and the pleasantly spicy pineapple-orange ribs.

Also impressive were the very crisp duck and the juicy sirloin au poivre that was escorted by a coronet of wispy French fries.

The problem of keeping dishes hot plagued an entree of crisp duck, which should have been dubbed fatty duck, for the skin of the tepid bird was anything but crisp.

The kitchen turns out exciting Thai dishes like shreds of crisp duck, as rich as confit, with onions, bell peppers and chilies.

Another salad, yum ped krob ($10.95), is similarly balanced, with bits of crisp duck flavored with ginger, anise-scented basil, ground peanuts and lime.