DUO, Stamford

DUO
cuisine: Euro-Japanese
entrées: $16 – $30
address: 25 Bank Street, Stamford
phone: (203) 252-2233
credit cards: Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover

4 1/2 Stars… Special

The Stamford dining scene is exploding with exciting new restaurants. One of the latest to arrive with a bang is Duo, which is located next door to Plateau, already a personal favorite. Both Plateau and Duo are owned by Jim Chan, who originally hails from China’s Fujian province. Taken together, the restaurants illustrate the difference between “pan-Asian” and “Asian fusion,” two culinary terms that have many people—including some restaurant critics not worth their salt—confused.

Plateau is pan-Asian, meaning it features a repertoire of authentic dishes from several Eastern nations (albeit prepared with some creative flair). Being true to various Oriental cuisines is no simple task, when ingredients and techniques vary subtly among them. It’s difficult enough to delve into just two cuisines, as a surfeit of mediocre Korean-Japanese restaurants in the tri-state area illustrated in the 1990s.

What Duo pulls off is even more challenging. Duo serves up Euro-Japanese fusion, meaning Western and Eastern ingredients and techniques are combined in evocative ways. Chan would probably prefer I not use the “F” word because in these parts, thanks to the cheap shots of some critics who find it clever to pun about “confusion,” fusion has gotten a bit of a bad rap.

But it’s my job to enlighten, to educate and to combat unwarranted prejudice. So allow me to climb onto my soapbox and address some misconceptions surrounding fusion cooking. First of all, cuisines don’t evolve in a vacuum, and most cooking, including all contemporary or new American cooking, is fused to some degree. Second, in the right hands, fusion cooking produces some of the most exhilarating food anywhere. Just in Greenwich, consider restaurants like Baang Café, Nuage, Tengda and Palomino. For years I trekked all the way to Groton for long-gone Restaurant Diana, a Lebanese-Liberian fusion (of all the unlikely combinations) that I sorely miss.

In the wrong hands, fusion cooking admittedly can be jarring. Fusion deserves the bad rap it gets when the practitioner doesn’t properly understand one or more of the cuisines he’s merging. It’s like trying to breed a Dachshund with a Whippet. If you force things enough, you can probably get it done—but you may not like the end results.

Duo is in the right hands, all right. Executive chef Anan Tiwadon, an Indian from Malaysia who has cooked in the Four Seasons Hotel in cosmopolitan Singapore (which I visited a month earlier), shows more flashes of brilliance than a Fourth of July fireworks display. He is exceptionally well-grounded in Western techniques and ingredients, but informs them with firsthand knowledge of Asian cooking. And sushi chef Chee Meng So, also Malaysian, rolls out some of Connecticut’s best and most creative sushi.

Good East-West fusion would be reason enough to christen a restaurant Duo, but it turns out that the clever Chan has something else up his well-tailored sleeve. The restaurant is so named because virtually every kitchen preparation—appetizer, entrée or dessert—includes two different treatments of the central ingredient. This approach even extends to much of the sushi.

Real foodies like myself want to try as many dishes as possible. They want to sample their companions’ food as well as their own. They can’t resist tapas or small plate restaurants. They’re drawn to tasting menus, to wine and beer dinners, to omakase and kaiseke suppers. They can’t fathom how both halves of a couple could order the exact same thing when they could have shared two different dishes between them. For such individuals, Duo is nirvana. Every order provides twice the culinary experience—greater bang for the buck.

Duo’s food is so pleasurable that it’s like taking one’s taste buds to the cinema. But to measure up to the chic bistros of Asia, a restaurant needs to have a sleek interior and well-appointed tables. Duo certainly does, its quarters stylish and inviting, its tables outfitted with intriguing silverware and chopsticks. Even its modernistic, stainless steel bathrooms drew praise.

We began with sushi, and Duo’s immediately takes its place among Connecticut’s best. For imagination and unconventionality, the sushi approaches that of Miya Japanese in New Haven; for freshness and stylishness, it gives Wasabi in Orange a run for its money. Just as one first tests pizza with a simple margherita pie, we sampled the sushi with plain nigiri-style salmon ($6), yellowtail ($6) and tuna ($6). All three were sparklingly fresh, soft and silky, the rice pillows shrunken to emphasize the fantastic fish. Also served nigiri-style, stunning freshwater eel ($6) came straight from Japan (not China or Taiwan), the eel sauce avoiding sticky, cloying excess. Never mind wonderful touches like palate-cleansing yamamomo plums, less-fibrous yellow ginger, optional fresh wasabi and three dips (unadorned soy sauce, a soy-wasabi sauce and a spicy rémoulade).

Having aced the first part of the test, it was on to the sushi rolls. There’s little point getting creative with sushi combinations if the basic ingredients aren’t premium, but Duo’s rolls proved to be attractive, well-formed and scrumptious (like so many good things in life). Each order included two preparations. On the vegetarian end, the Buddha ($15) included a half-roll of tempura portobello and sautéed wild mushroom in a soy glaze and a half-roll of romaine lettuce, mushroom, avocado, sun-dried tomato, burdock root and lime salt. The Bayou ($12) contrasted a half-roll of Cajun spice-encrusted albacore tuna, sun-dried tomato salsa and black pepper aïoli with a half-roll of yuzu-encrusted white tuna and scallion. Perhaps my favorite pairing was the Smoke & Spice ($13) in which a half-roll of honey crab stick and rice cracker topped with spicy salmon and Key lime sauce dueled with a half-roll of smoked salmon wrapped in white seaweed with cilantro, avocado, cream cheese and tobiko. Some combinations are pretty daring, so select carefully. As Clint Eastwood once famously intoned, a man’s gotta know his limitations.

The final part of the test, passed like the others with flying colors, was the sushi-inspired appetizers. Hamachi ($14) juxtaposed yellowtail sashimi with jalapeño and yuzu soy against pan-seared hamachi with mango salsa and apple-balsamic reduction. Tuna ($14) played a tartare of tuna with sushi rice, grape and red wine reduction against fresh albacore pizza with sun-dried tomato salsa and basil-balsamic drizzle.

Our sushi we enjoyed with a bottle of Kurosawa Jun-Mai Kimoto sake ($19), but we turned to a conventional wine, a 2005 L de Lyeth Cabernet Sauvignon, Sonoma, California ($32), to accompany our not-so-conventional kitchen fare. Sushi is still the lesser half of what this incredible restaurant does, and even if you have no interest in it whatsoever, you may find plenty to love in what the kitchen produces.

A rock shrimp starter ($10) was one of my favorites (a relative term, because a foodie’s head will pivot as dishes pass like that of a teenage boy with a front row seat at the annual Victoria’s Secret extravaganza). One half of the tandem was light, crispy, tempura-battered rock shrimp in a spicy bottarga aïoli, the other nearly a dozen skewered rock shrimp flavorfully sautéed and served with a wasabi emulsion.

Duo’s goat cheese appetizer ($11) paired neat cubes of oven-roasted Asian pear, herbs and goat cheese with a goat cheese salad, grape compote and aged balsamic glaze. Its duck appetizer ($12) married pan-seared Peking duck and honey soy glaze served nigiri-style with luscious roasted duck breast au jus and potato confit, the fowl humor extended, intentionally or not, with a bright orange gooseberry.

Since Duo also features a duck main course ($27), one can wind up experiencing four duck preparations (five, if you’re in a fowl enough mood to try a sushi roll of foie gras, saltwater eel and cucumber in a truffle-soy emulsion). The entrée version presented dueling preparations of popcorn-encrusted duck in a thyme-cassis reduction and duck ravioli in a light duck jus.

We tried two more main dishes, each more amazing than the last. The pasta ($18) included both green tea tortellini stuffed with jumbo lump crabmeat and green tea soba noodles flavored with octopus, pesto, garlic, white asparagus and beet foam. For some, foam is another “F” word, which irritates me no end. Foams are nothing more than a little color, texture and flavor applied to a dish. Why on earth should foams be singled out for disapproval when Americans readily accept a broad range of moist accompaniments including sauces and salsas, juices and juses, reductions and rémoulades, oils and aïolis, pestos and pebres, glaces and demi-glaces, nages and gastriques? It’s just emulsion that’s taken me over…

As good as the pasta was, Duo’s beef entrée blew us away. Never mind the visual pyrotechnics, like a delicate, barrel hoop-shaped, potato garnish or perfectly cooked side vegetables, some standing erect. Almost buttery, oven-roasted, natural prime tenderloin ($30) with corn purée was accompanied by the most teeth-tinglingly flavorful braised shoulder you’re ever likely to find.

Dessert? Why the hell not? The warm chocolate cake ($11) served with a slice of chocolate-hazelnut mousse and vanilla ice cream was exceptional. Our dining party liked the strawberry soufflé ($10) with strawberry sorbet almost as much. Also “our cup of tea” was a green tea mousse ($10) matched with green tea crème brûlée.

The Stamford dining scene is undergoing a radical transformation. Duo is right on its cutting edge. Ignore the many distractions and beat a path to its door.