A Kaiser Doctor's Backyard Peking Duck Has Drawn Roy Choi and Phil Rosenthal

Radiologist Hong Pham's pop-up, That Peking Duck Guy, dry-ages its ducks up to 10 days and has more than 300 people waiting.

Hong Pham, a Kaiser radiologist, roasts Peking duck in his South Pasadena backyard. More than 300 people are waiting to get one.

The pop-up is called That Peking Duck Guy, and food writer Heather Platt first reported on it for the Los Angeles Times on Tuesday. For more than a year Pham cooked only for friends and family. Over the last six months, the Times reported, it's grown into a business with a waitlist and catering clients.

You'll want to repeat the guest list. Pham's circle of food friends has included Phil Rosenthal, the TV producer, and Roy Choi, the chef, the outlet reported.

For everyone else, it's a preorder game. There's a limited number of ducks, you order ahead, and dinner comes as a kit built for four. You pick it up at a gate marked with an orange duck logo that his eldest daughter drew. Alongside the carved duck come mu shu pancakes, hoisin, scallions, cucumber, duck bone broth and duck fat noodles.

The Times didn't list a price or say how to join the waitlist.

The whole operation runs on one strange-looking machine. It's a silver, pod-shaped Chinese duck roaster that YouTube kept putting in front of him through videos of street food stalls in Asia. People call it the Apollo oven, after the space capsule, and Pham tracked one down in Riverside and drove out to haul it home.

He worked through char siu, pork belly and chicken before he felt ready for duck, which he considers the peak of Cantonese barbecue. Then he did something most home cooks wouldn't: he texted Mei Lin, the chef behind the now-closed Nightshade and 88 Club, without ever having met her. She wrote back. A week later he bought a duck, followed her instructions nearly to the letter and it worked.

Lin has since had his duck herself. She told the Times she admires "how committed he has been to learning and refining his technique."

The technique is where Pham's ducks get their reputation. He pumps air under the skin, scalds it, rubs the inside with salt, white pepper, galangal and five spice, and then leaves the bird to dry-age for seven to 10 days in a refrigerator in his garage that holds nothing else.

He also roasts pipa duck, named for the Chinese lute it resembles once it's deboned and splayed on a wire rack. It cooks in half the time, and Pham says the point of that one is the seasoned meat, not the skin. If I were choosing between his two ducks, I'd put the Peking first, because that week and more in the garage is the part of his method nobody else in the neighborhood is doing.

Speaking of the neighborhood, it's a quiet, hilly residential street, and apparently a patient one. "My next-door neighbor had no idea that we were roasting duck this whole time until we invited him over for my birthday party," Pham told the Times.

None of this is new territory for him. Pham and his wife, Kim, met at the University of Michigan and started a blog in the early 2000s, the Ravenous Couple, to keep their families' Vietnamese recipes. That turned into hosting and, eventually, Vietnamese cooking classes at home. As a kid he helped his mother cook for hundreds at her Vietnamese church in Michigan, and in college he helped run pho nights for 50 to 60 students.

If you'd rather skip the pickup line entirely, there's catering. Pham brings the roasters to your party and cooks on site, the ducks are ready in about an hour and a half, and he usually hands the host the job of pulling them out.

Source: latimes.com, retrieved September 30, 2026.