Chronicle No. 71 · Places

The Duck With a Number: La Tour d'Argent Has Been Counting Since 1890

A Paris restaurant presses its ducks in silver and hands every guest a numbered card. The register has been running for more than a century.

At 15 Quai de la Tournelle, on the left bank of the Seine, La Tour d'Argent serves a duck that comes with paperwork.

The dish is caneton Tour d'Argent. The bird is carved at the table, and the carcass is crushed in a silver press to draw out a sauce of blood, marrow and cognac. It is theatre with a machine in it, and it has been performed in the same room for well over a century.

In 1890 the maître d'hôtel Frédéric Delair added the detail that outlasted everything else on the menu. He began numbering the ducks, and handing each guest a card with their number on it.

The register has been kept ever since:

The house also keeps one of the great wine cellars, and tells one of the great cellar stories: that when Paris was occupied, the best of it was sealed behind a false wall and the Germans drank what was left in front of it.

The card costs the restaurant almost nothing. It is the thing guests photograph.

Lesson: A bill is a record; a number is a membership. The cheapest thing you put on the table can be the thing the guest keeps for forty years.

Frédéric Delair carving the duck, in an anonymous painting from the end of the nineteenth century.
Frédéric Delair carving the duck, in an anonymous painting from the end of the nineteenth century. — Wikimedia Commons · Pascal Radigue · CC BY-SA 4.0
La Tour d’Argent from the Seine, on the Quai de la Tournelle.
La Tour d’Argent from the Seine, on the Quai de la Tournelle. — Wikimedia Commons · Tangopaso · Public domain
The view the dining room is built around: Notre-Dame across the river.
The view the dining room is built around: Notre-Dame across the river. — Wikimedia Commons · Tangopaso · Public domain