How Joe Cash Rocks the Duck

8 Minute read

18 Oct 2026

Joe Cash. Credit: Paul Mehaffey

At Greenville’s Michelin-starred Scoundrel, the chef’s signature duck draws on his Per Se training and years of experimentation in New York.

Joe Cash has already spent two weeks preparing the duck you’re about to eat at Scoundrel, his Michelin-starred restaurant in his hometown of Greenville, South Carolina. Dry-aging it on the bone is only the beginning. The duck is then roasted in a specialty oven, lacquered with honey, finished with Maldon salt, and immediately chilled to stop the cooking.

If it were up to Cash, he’d be spinning that duck on a rotisserie, a technique he picked up while working at Major Food Group in Manhattan. But Scoundrel doesn’t have the space. His solution? A Rational combi oven (some models cost more than $20,000), which can cook with steam, convection heat, or both.

“We’ll stick it in the Rational, you know, super high fan, really just rock the duck,” he says.

Cash sells more than 20 orders a night, often selling out during the first turn of service. “People know us and come to us just to have that duck,” he says.

The skin is crisp and delicate, the breast cooked medium-rare. Deep and rich, the meat almost eats like beef. It arrived with kale, poached rhubarb, and mustard jus, though the accompaniments change with the season.

Enter beneath the crimson glow of a neon sign and into a dining room of wood floors, arched mirrors, and 20th-century French caricature-style art. Strung with lights, the room is equal parts homey and elegant, the bar lined end to end with regulars eating oysters.

“Nothing’s frou-frou here,” says Cash. “We have an exact way that we want to do things, but it’s loose and fun, while being tight and sexy in its own little world.”

Growing up, Cash never imagined cooking duck at his own Michelin-starred restaurant. He was more interested in sports.

“I played baseball my whole life,” he says. He’d always loved food, but he took his first restaurant job because he needed work, starting as a busser at a local Lone Star Steakhouse. Captivated by the energy of the live-fire grill, he moved into the kitchen on his 18th birthday.

“Just the energy, and everything that was going on was so cool,” he says, looking toward his own kitchen. “I loved the fire on the grill.”

By the end of the year, he was running the grill. Encouraged by his mother, he enrolled in a local culinary program before working at two of Greenville’s fine dining restaurants. When a fellow sous chef introduced him to The French Laundry Cookbook, it became a holy text.

“I think all my buddies were at one of my friends' house playing video games,” Cash remembers, “and I'm just sitting there poring through The French Laundry Cookbook, thinking, look at these tomatoes! They put the perfect chives on them!”

To build the skills he was looking for, Cash moved to New York to work at Thomas Keller’s Per Se. What began as a trial turned into a four-year run, during which he started as a commis prep cook and worked his way up to the meat roast station.

“We would dry-age those ducks for almost two weeks,” Cash says of his time at Per Se. “Sometimes more.”

Cash left Per Se for a year at Noma in Copenhagen, then returned to New York to work in research and development for Major Food Group. There, he spent years refining his approach to duck breast, experimenting with different preparations and grilling techniques.

Cash returned to Greenville in late 2020 and opened Scoundrel in October 2022. It’s what he calls “a serious restaurant,” drawing on the classical techniques he learned throughout his career. Caviar comes with crème fraîche and duck fat potatoes, a Caesar salad arrives blanketed in Parmesan, and steak tartare is served tableside like the best version of chain restaurant guacamole.

The burger can come dripping in veal jus, while larger dishes include steaks and poisson pour deux, grilled branzino in a rich clam neck beurre blanc.

Esquire named Scoundrel one of its Best New Restaurants in America in 2023. The restaurant became a James Beard Award semifinalist for Best New Restaurant in 2024 and earned a Michelin star in 2025. In 2026, Cash was a James Beard Award finalist for Best Chef: Southeast.

Cash is also preparing to open Dootsie’s, an Italian restaurant named for his grandmother, with Roman pastas and Italian American favorites.

Back at Scoundrel, his focus remains on getting the food and service right, night after night. The duck, with its two weeks of aging and multiple stages of preparation, shows what that takes.

“Good is not good enough, like, that’s not what we’re going for,” Cash says. “We fight for the details every single time.”

For Cash, rocking the duck starts long before it reaches the oven.