spring hill

There has been no shortage of high profile restaurant openings in Seattle over the past year – it has actually been quite a feat keeping up with them all.  That explains why I only just recently managed to make it to chef Mark Fuller’s new culinary destination Spring Hill in West Seattle (well, that and the fact that if I’m actually making the trip out to West Seattle, I’ll be easting sushi at Mashiko, but I’ll save that for another time).  On this particular occasion, I had guests arriving from out of town, so I thought an expedition over the bridge would be an entertaining way to pass the evening.  I was eager to discover for myself what everybody else had been raving about the past few months.

I was not disappointed.  Well, mostly.  Spring Hill is located on California Ave SW inbetween Genesee and Oregon, and reservations were definitely required – every seat in the house was taken.  The space was modern and elegant, with soft wood panels and straight lines that shotgun the length of the narrow, symmetrical room.  Booths on the left, tables in the center, the bar and the open kitchen on the right (the cooks themselves forming another straight line).  True to everything I’d read, Mark Fuller’s wife Marjorie was delightfully gracious and amicable as hostess.

I had eaten many times under Fuller’s tenure as head chef at Tom Douglas’ flagship restaurant Dahlia Lounge, so I figured I had a pretty good inclination of what to expect.  I couldn’t have been more wrong.  All of the previous restraint and fastidious presentation I had associated with Fuller’s cooking were out the window.  The food at Spring Hill is big and bold and messy.  The smell of sizzling meat and smoke permeates everything.  The food is sensual, almost dirty.

We started with the crispy veal sweetbreads, fried up like chicken nuggets and served with three dipping sauces – housemade barbeque, ranch dressing and mustard.  Fuller clearly has his tongue planted firmly in cheek, and this playfulness comes across throughout the menu.  Nothing like a little pancreas served up à la Burger King to get the conversation started!

And speaking of burgers, I’m usually not a huge fan, but the 1/2 pound Strawberry Mountain beef burger with huge slabs of housemade bacon oozing teleme and white cheddar cheeses served on a sesame seed bun with a side of “special sauce” and beef fat fries was an unequivocal masterpiece.  The outside of the burger is smoky and has a light char, and the inside drips with aromatic juices.  The burger towers above you, and can only be mastered with a knife and fork (and three other dining companions).  The only misfire was the fries – the texture was fairly off-putting, almost mealy, like they had been previously frozen.

Which would be hard to believe, given the lengths Fuller has gone to locally source all of his ingredients (the menu is painstakingly detailed, crediting every last farm, cheesemaker and forager he uses).  And it was the last of these (the legendary Jeremy Faber of Foraged and Found), which brought me the most thrilling surprise of the evening: the elusive Hen of the Woods mushroom, featured alongside chanterelles, delicata squash and chard in a beautiful bowl of handmade tagliatelle.  This would be a first.  The bowl arrived smelling of autumn, and I sank my teeth into the tender noodles.  The Hen of the Woods was earthy, but not pungent, with a hint of sweetness.  It was a very delicate flavor, and sadly, almost entirely lost underneath the overly generous pile of shredded parmesan that permeated the bowl.

These tiny hiccups repeated throughout the meal, each dish having a bold and thoughtful center with some minor misstep in execution.  Nothing glaring, but certainly noticeable.  The wood grilled prawns with creamy grits were delicious, tasting of sea and smoke and piled on top of an exquisite poached egg.  But the grits themselves were watery and so finely ground as to be virtually undetectable.  The beef steak hot & cold featured a duo of beef – a wood grilled rib eye cap steak and a raw steak tartare.  The rib eye was toothesome and devoured in seconds, but the tartare could not compete with the rich, concentrated steak and tasted almost dull in comparison (and the potato cracklings at the center were so light, they were almost entirely devoid of flavor).

But overall, the audacity of chef Fuller’s vision more or less eclipses these slight shortcomings.  The burger alone is worth another visit.  At the end of the evening, a final whimsical creation completed the meal: a bowl of Ovaltine ice cream, malty and smile provoking.

There’s a lot going on at Spring Hill, and I certainly feel like I have much more to explore before I can make a definitive conclusion.  Now if I can just bring myself to get back over to West Seattle…