The Best Thing I Ate All Week: Duck Club at Pourhouse

Ever heard of a backronym? I hadn’t until I tried to Google the origin of “club sandwich” today (the name comes from the dish being prepared at clubs, duh). If you weren’t on Twitter in mid-2018, you may have missed the idiocy that was “Chicken Lettuce Under Bun.” Many users tweeted and retweeted the acronym, convinced they had discovered the origin of the name. I guess they conveniently forgot that “club” is short for “clubhouse” (Chicken Lettuce Under Bun Hold On U’ll Soon Eat?) and created a viral backronym, or the retroactive acronymism of a word.

There’s something to bring up over your next lunch break—or even better, take your next lunch break at Pourhouse and order the sandwich that started it all. The Gastown restaurant has just reopened lunch service in celebration of their 10th anniversary. The new lunch menu includes old favourites like the Scotch egg and new eats like the prawn cocktail (which deserves an honourable mention; embracing the horseradish kick is a great way to assert dominance over your lunch date). I ordered the duck club, a hearty handheld made with duck, pork belly, arugula, Divina tomatoes and wild blueberry mayo sandwiched between Nelson the Seagull sourdough.

There’s nothing backwards about this club. Fabulous taste aside, it’s refreshing to have a club sandwich that doesn’t fall apart on impact or have toothpicks as a main ingredient. This dish has integrity, structurally and otherwise.

The star of this sandwich is inarguably the delightfully tender cured duck breast, but the wild blueberry mayo is a surprising runner-up. It gives the sandwich an extra sweetness, sort of like an elevated turkey-and-cranberry duo. The variety of tastes and textures presented in one dish make every bite different. The teamwork is seamless, almost like—bear with me—a club.

I ordered the duck club with fries (obviously—why anyone would order a side salad on a rainy day is beyond me), which came piping hot and in the perfect quantity. Which is to say, exactly too many to eat responsibly and too few to take home as leftovers. I ate more than I should have, and was happily stuffed and well-padded for the skytrain ride home.

I think making jokes about animals while eating meat is in poor taste, so I’m totally not saying that this was a lucky duck.

$19
New lunch service weekdays from 11:30 a.m. – 2:00 p.m.