Every so often, I’ll wake up to an inbox full of friendly emails from people volunteering to help me do my job. The specific assistance they are offering is to meet me at some forthcoming restaurant, their stomachs empty and ready to contain at least half the menu. When I get three or four of these volunteers on the same morning, it invariably means that while I was sleeping other people were reading the advance press on an incipient opening that sounds both unusually enticing and intimidatingly expensive.

The most recent rush of volunteers, it turned out, was inspired by the arrival in December of a Manhattan branch of the Beijing-based restaurant DaDong. While the Beijingese have excelled at the art of duck roasting for centuries, DaDong, I learned, is a relative newcomer, founded in the 1990s by the chef Dong Zhenxiang.

At the restaurants — there are 10 in Beijing and six in other Chinese cities, not counting casual spinoffs — the birds revolve, a dozen at a time, inside a circular wood-fueled oven that Mr. Dong has patented. The result is what some people consider Beijing’s best Peking duck. This is a magical combination of words. “Beijing’s best Peking duck” suggests a mandatory eating experience in a way that, say, “Russia’s best Russian dressing” does not.

It took me and my first corps of volunteers some time to find one another because the restaurant’s address, 3 Bryant Park, implied that the entrance would be somewhere around Bryant Park. DaDong is inside a stack of glass-and-steel blocks that has somehow been plunked down west of the park between 42nd and 41st Streets, beside a pocket plaza that was new to me, although the skateboarders seemed to know all about it.