Press

New York’s Peking duck enthusiasts have had reason to be on edge lately. In the fall, a kitchen fire knocked down Decoy, the small, sunken rathskeller below RedFarm in the West Village that once served what many people considered the finest version of the dish in the city. The restaurant is expected to survive, but it probably won’t reopen until this summer.

The other night, as some friends and I left dinner at Ju Qi, in a new luxury mall called Tangram, in Flushing, we passed a group of patrons in the foyer behaving like kids in a candy store, literally, raiding bowls of complimentary treats with glee. They proffered handfuls for us to try, too: foil-wrapped disks of haw flakes, ruddy-pink wafers made from the red berries of the Chinese hawthorn; miniature twists of brown-sugar-glazed fried dough known as ma hua.