STK reopens in South Beach with a duck breast as richly spiced as the magic city itself.
While duck is a rarity on Miami menus, STK’s vibrant, spice-rubbed duck breast will forever change how you think about the poultry.
“Not your daddy’s steakhouse” is STK’s tag line, and one that sums up the contemporarily chic restaurant that originated in New York’s Meatpacking District and has since expanded to locations in Atlanta, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Washington, DC. “It’s the type of place where you can have a good time and loosen up during dinner and no one is going to judge you for it,” says South East Regional Corporate Chef Aaron Taylor of the steakhouse, which recently reopened in Miami at the new 1 Hotel & Homes South Beach.
When STK Miami originally closed in 2013, Taylor took to the road, hopping into STK kitchens around the country. “New York always has some type of duck on the menu, but we’ve never done duck in Miami,” he says. Until now, with the restaurant’s spiced duck breast entrée...
The Other Other White Meat
Taylor cites awareness as the main driving force for putting the poultry on the menu. “I want people to know there’s more to steakhouses than just red meat,” says the Cleveland native, who first brought his talents to South Beach in 2008 for the opening of Meat Market. “I had an opportunity to work as chef de cuisine alongside Sean [Brasel] and couldn’t pass that up.” It was there that Taylor learned beef is only a small part of the puzzle. “Duck is kind of like the forgotten meat,” he says.
Preparing the Bird
“Duck has a bad reputation,” Taylor says of the animal commonly regarded as gamey. To counter the misconception, he sources his birds from Long Island’s Crescent Duck—a farm noted for producing fine duck since 1908. “It’s the best eating duck for the consumer,” says Taylor, who rubs the breasts with curry, cinnamon, brown sugar, and piment d’espelette (a variety of chili pepper cultivated in France) before setting them to a slow render to cook out the fat without overdoing it. “Duck can be pretty fatty, and we want to get it crispy at the top but pink in the middle.” Taylor simultaneously sears an accompanying duck roulade till it’s browned at the edges. “First we confit the legs and then pick it apart while it’s hot and roll it up.”
Balancing Act
“The biggest thing for me with every dish is to try to create a perfect balance between acidity, salty, and sweet,” the chef says. In the case of STK’s spiced duck breast, Taylor strikes that balance with lots of elements. Tangy whole-grain apricot mustard and acidic pickled cabbage coat the plate and cut the richness of the roulade, and he bathes the vibrant and tender sliced duck breasts in sweet duck jus reduction before spooning an earthy-citrusy apricot pistachio chutney on top. Even with so much going on, each element manages to stand and shine alone: the fuzziness of the apricot slices in the chutney, the crunch and nuttiness of the pistachios, the aromatic and fragrant taste of the pink white meat that you barely even need to chew, all countered with the roulade’s rough (in a good way) edges. Like STK, it’s a party for the palate. 2301 Collins Ave., Miami Beach, 305-604-6988