At Good Voyage in South Park, chef Max Walsh serves every bit of a duck except the quack.
The nose-to-tail evangelist has gotten people to eat hearts and gizzards — and to lick their fingers while doing it.
Good Voyage | Seattle Times Critic’s Pick | French | $$ | South Park | 8520 14th Ave. S.; goodvoyageseattle.com | noise level: low | reservations: for 6 or more only; walk-ins for smaller parties | access: can be difficult to navigate on wheelchairs due to uneven sidewalk; one gender-neutral restroom
Walsh’s bestselling dish, the disco frites, consists of offal and meat scraped from bony wings, then coated in a sherry gravy made from carcasses and duck fat. He serves this poutine riff over a stack of fries bound with American cheese and flecked with serrano chiles.
I have not seen a single Good Voyage customer leave behind even one stray disco fry in the bowl.
Inspired by modest, waste-nothing French cooking, the kitchen at Good Voyage subscribes to whole animal butchery. The self-taught chef Walsh strives to serve every part of the waterfowl. He breaks down the thigh, drumstick and breast for entrees; liver for a mousse spread appetizer; and other odds and ends, organs and bones, for stocks and sauces.
The dinner menu is short, but its well-executed brevity makes it appear deceptively simple.
Good Voyage may sound familiar. The space it occupies in South Park, over the Duwamish from Georgetown, is a reboot of the coffeehouse of the same name that Campbell and Amanda Scarborough opened in 2022.
At that time, this scrappy counter operation served breakfast sandwiches, pastries, tinned fish and frozen pizzas, in addition to hosting pop-ups. One year after the business opened, a fire shuttered the coffeehouse in late 2023.
When the cafe reopened last year, the couple embarked on a quest for a more ambitious menu. They enlisted Walsh, who had run an English muffin pop-up in the space, as executive chef and part owner.
Their revamped dining space is a single room colored the teal green of a deep-sea voyage, with cafe tables and benches along the wall and high stools at the counter facing a La Marzocco espresso machine.
The aesthetics allow the place to slide easily from coffeehouse by day to Parisian-inspired bistro by night.
Come 4:50 p.m., the chef will post the cuts of meat available on the chalkboard in preparation for when dinner service starts at 5 o’clock.
The lineup includes a rotating seafood dish (likely a play for unsuspecting diners who didn’t realize this was a duck-centric affair). On a recent visit, I ordered a roasted whole trout, its soft white flesh served in a sweet, wine-butter sauce accented by the briny pop of capers. It was very good and substantial for $32.
But discerning diners will make the trek to Good Voyage for the duck.
Take Walsh’s cooking as a spirited argument for the supremacy and versatility of duck over chicken. His excellent allium-tinged duck liver mousse tastes richer than the standard chicken liver mousse you’ll find around town.
The entree of a duck drumstick and thigh, cured and slow-cooked in duck fat until the silky meat easily falls from the bone, landed nicely with the licorice lick of fennel.
No one leaves this restaurant — or rather, nobody should leave here — without an order of frites, which are among the best in Seattle. Thrice-cooked until tawny and crunchy, these russet fries come with your choice of ketchup, hot sauce or aioli. But you can make this dish a supernova with thick gravy when you order the disco frites.
No matter what else you order, save room for the duck breast. The cafe sets aside five to eight breasts nightly, each around 7 to 10 ounces, and priced between $38 and $53, respectively.
This signature dish arrives sliced and arrayed like a stack of pink dominoes.
The breast is dry-aged to yield a crispier skin when it kisses the frying pan. The result is a bite that greets the palate in three stages: at first, that crispy skin reminds one of a pork crackling. It’s followed by a soft, unctuous fattiness that dissolves on the tongue. Finally comes the meaty center, slightly gamey, like a richer (and a better) version of a chicken thigh.
The handful of sides at Good Voyage — simple preparations of salads, lentils and beans — are not aggressively seasoned, perhaps to better complement the duck dishes. The gigante beans and heirloom tomatoes were a particular standout, zinged with a fiery condiment consisting of smoked chiles, fried alliums, seeds and MSG. Think: chili crisp meets salsa macha.
At Good Voyage, the presentation of duck dishes, taken from every part of the duck, is fabulous. You’ll never look at the fowl the same way again.
This French-inspired cafe would be busier on Capitol Hill or in Ballard. But the quieter setting along the main drag of South Park makes for a less helter-skelter pace. Right now, there is no waitlist or long lines.
And the wines at Good Voyage would certainly not be as cheap in a neighborhood with steeper rent.
Campbell, who also runs the vino bar Left Bank one door down, curates the list of natural wines, with many stellar pours by the glass for only $12 to $14. The house white, for instance, is a flinty, un-oaked chardonnay ($9) that tastes like a pricey Chablis.
Good Voyage had once seemed to me a curious name for a bistro in gritty South Park. Then I went and I ate. Now the name seems just right for a place that delivered a trip I hadn’t expected.
Tan Vinh: 206-515-5656 or tvinh@seattletimes.com. Tan Vinh is a food writer for The Seattle Times and the original host of “Seattle Eats,” a podcast from KUOW.
Dining and Cooking