Hanna Raskin wrote, "The dishes at Spur Gastropub change so frequently that it's almost impossible to catch and commit them to a permanent list. Since this collection of favorite dishes is meant to have a longer shelf life than a loaf of bread, there's no use spending a slot on, say, the salad of smoked baby artichoke hearts bathed in smoked yogurt or the lamb merguez on Spur's current menu (Although if you're in Belltown, you ought to order them both.)But chefs Brian McCracken and Dana Tough have kept their terrifically popular tagliatelle on the menu since Spur's 2008 opening, and the dish seems likely to stick around, making it the perfect list stand-in for all the fleeting veal sweetbreads and spot prawn preparations.
The tagliatelle is a mission statement at Spur, which has never shied away from molecular gastronomy and other trends that reliably turn off diners who think any entree with a double-digit price tag should come with a steak knife. Like all the best modern dishes, the dish can't be eaten with the eyes: Only the palate can parse all the flavors dripped and dropped on the willfully abstracted plate.
The fresh pasta is topped with a trembling duck egg, primed to spill a yolk that's spent 45 minutes luxuriating in a 145-degree bath. But the egg's partially obscured by a cloud of foam flavored by Parmesan rinds, and there's a toboggan run of Parmesan leaving against the noodles, which are threaded with oyster mushrooms. It's a hot mess of umami.
And while the dish has become a fixture, it's clearly the product of a kitchen that prefers change. The tagliatelle and the sous vide egg beautifully demonstrate two very different things that can be done with an egg, a neat trick for a restaurant that's obsessed with possibility."
Photo by Raskin.
