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Andrew Sun

Pressed duck, or canard à la presse, has historically been a grand culinary spectacle found only in luxury hotels and fine-dining restaurants.
Part of the allure of the traditional French dish is its elaborate table-side preparation as the duck’s juices, blood and marrow are pressed out and added to a thick, rich sauce that is served with the meat.
But many gastronomes have never tried the dish because so few restaurants offer it.
A new bistro in Hong Kong’s Sai Ying Pun neighbourhood aims to change this by introducing the dish to the masses.

At Le Colvert, operated by a small French team including restaurant manager Hubert Dubouix and chef Guillaume Sejourne, pressed duck is the signature dish.
“We are quite French, so this is our speciality,” Dubouix says of the dish, intended for four people. “We wanted to bring something we are proud of and something not often seen in Hong Kong.”
Sejourne has worked for more than a decade in Hong Kong, including at a Michelin-star French restaurant, The Peninsula hotel and with Pirata restaurant group.
He says making the dish – which involves par-roasting the duck, then carving it and removing the meat before the carcass goes out to the dining room to be pressed while the meat finishes roasting in the kitchen – is not easy.
“It requires a lot of technique and consistency. Plus, both the front of house and back of house need to be quite coordinated, synchronised to make sure the duck is presented in the best way possible.
“We have to cook part of the meat first, but not overcook it, so the bones still have a lot of blood inside. Therefore, it’s a bit complicated,” he says.
“A point of specificity of the dish is the way the animal is harvested. They do not cut the throat, which is the usual way most others slaughter. Instead, they squeeze their neck, asphyxiate them, which retains the blood inside the body.”
The blood not only adds to the dish’s distinctive, slightly metallic-tasting sauce, but is believed to also tenderise the meat.
The French ducks grow quite large. They’re grown for about eight weeks … That gives the meat more flavour
Simon Lebon, Le Colvert’s assistant manager
Could pressed duck become a trending food in 2025? In France, the dish is enjoying a revival, having returned to many menus after a bird flu outbreak, particularly in the duck-raising region of Rouen, devastated fowl production in the country in 2022 and 2023.
The Parisian restaurant most famous for serving pressed duck, La Tour d’Argent, reopened in August 2023 after two years of renovations, presenting what the BBC recently called “France’s most elaborate and macabre” dish.
“When I was in culinary school, I had some school mates who apprenticed at La Tour d’Argent,” Sejourne says.
“I was very envious of them having the opportunity to work with such a beautiful product. So it has been on my mind for 20 years to do this dish with all the tradition and specific equipment that it requires.”

Le Colvert’s name refers to a famous kind of green-headed mallard duck, but the restaurant uses a different kind of mallard raised by the fourth generation of the famous duck-producing Burgaud family in Challans, western France.
It is more expensive than readily available, locally raised fowl, but it was still the natural choice for Le Colvert to use imported, free-range French duck rather than the cheaper, smaller Chinese ducks.
“[Using local ducks] was not a compromise we were willing to make. We wanted to do a French restaurant with French duck. We can see the difference between the two products. We wanted to bring the best and that is this beautiful product to Hong Kong,” Sejourne says.
“The French ducks grow quite large. They’re grown for about eight weeks, which is a bit longer than in some other places. That gives the meat more flavour because they are more mature. The density of fat compared to the meat and muscles is a lot less.
“It’s an animal that grows outside running around, and so the muscles are quite strong, making it tender and juicy.”

As Sejourne roasts the birds in the kitchen, he relies on his front-of-house partners, Dubouix and assistant manager Simon Lebon, to do the showstopping table-side performance.
After delicately breaking down the duck, they place it into the custom press to extract as much residual liquid as possible for the duck sauce, adding in butter, stock, cognac, port and more essences of the duck from its liver and innards.
Dubouix suggests the dish’s rarity is evidenced by there being only three or four duck presses available in Hong Kong. A quick search online found a brass press costing more than €4,000 (US$4,500).
Still, Lebon says Le Colvert is “trying to make pressed duck more approachable, making it easier for people to try it in a bistro atmosphere”.
“I’ve never heard of a bistro doing canard à la presse,” he says. “It’s still a very high-end product but we’re making it a little less formal, bringing it to people who want to enjoy it in a more relaxed atmosphere. We don’t have chandeliers [or] too classy a setting.”

As well as canard à la presse, Le Colvert offers an array of nose-to-tail duck dishes such as marinated duck tongue, confit gizzard, duck liver terrine and a smoked duck breast salad with mango and avocado.
And if all that sounds too fancy, there are also duck nuggets, duck burgers, duck pasta and duck-fat fries.
As for serving such ostentatious cuisine in the decidedly local neighbourhood that is Sai Ying Pun, Sejourne is optimistic. To paraphrase the movie Field Of Dreams, the chef believes that if he cooks it, they will come.
“We aim to be a destination. We aim to be a place where people come from all over Hong Kong. So being in Central or Sai Ying Pun doesn’t really make much difference from our perspective, because nobody else has done this before in Hong Kong. I think people will come to try.”
Le Colvert, 321 Des Voeux Road West, Sai Ying Pun. Tel: 9548 6555.


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Food & Drink

Hong Kong bistro Le Colvert serves pressed duck, a bloody dish usually seen only at fancy restaurants in France and which has had a revival.


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