• Michael Gebert
  • Kevin Hickey at the Duck Inn

One of the things that was most striking about a preview event a couple of weeks ago at Kevin Hickey’s the Duck Inn in Bridgeport was simply that everyone wasn’t 28 years old. That’s rare for preview events, and no doubt rare for Rockit Ranch, the restaurant group headed by media personality Billy Dec, which has mainly opened busy bars in River North (including Bottlefork, which Hickey initially consulted on). But it was a sign of how Duck Inn really is what it claims to be, a place rooted in the Bridgeport neighborhood, that so many people of all ages from the neighborhood turned out, from Ed Marszewski (who owns the beloved Maria’s Packaged Goods and Community Bar) to John Daley (of those Daleys).

A couple of things were spurred by the neighborhood, and by that original photo of the Duck Inn. When I saw hamburger sandwich [on a sign in that photo], I thought I have to make a hamburger sandwich, not on a bun because that’s not really a sandwich. So we wound up making a square hamburger, grass-fed from Tallgrass Beef, and we put everything on the grill at the same time. The patty goes on, the cheese goes on, the onions go on, the buttered rye bread goes on; you slap the cheese on the patty, the burger on the bread and we can put out a burger in three or four minutes. We use that Brun-uusto cheese from Brunkow that you always see at the farmer’s markets. So that’s the hamburger sandwich.

I’ve always wanted to do rotisserie duck. Duck was a big thing for me, as a chef, and personally I just love duck. We ate out a ton, and we used to go to this place on the southwest side called Old Prague. I would get the half duck with bread dumplings, I can still taste it. I don’t know if it’s still around, I heard it had a fire. [It’s gone—ed.]

But the technique is still there; it’s not easy, it’s not simple. Tamales are not easy. That’s a tough thing to do right and do well, consistently. You have to get masa dough just right. You can’t cook them to order, you have to hold them hot. And how do you hold them and they don’t suck after an hour? Okay, chili’s easy. But even a good French fry is not easy. There’s a lot of technique to a good french fry.

Cool! Nobody else had said that to me. So I went to look at the space, which had been Dragon Ranch, and I walked in and there was some smoke damage, which was nowhere near the fire department damage. I thought there was one huge long bar which had been smashed by the fire department—it was actually two, a small bar and then an open kitchen with a bar. But my immediate thought was, bar kitchen: the food and the drinks and the beer and cocktails have food in them and the food has cocktails and beer in it.