Spur Gastropub Review: Seattle Restaurant Week at Spur
Our first night in Seattle, we saw goats underneath a highway. It was the oddest thing for me. You just don’t expect goats in the middle of a city. This is way cooler than that guy who ate pizza with his goat in NYC (NYMag coverage). Apparently what happens is that the city of Seattle contracts out these goats to eat vegetation underneath some highway (Seattle PI). Pretty cool looking.
We ended up at Spur Gastropub from a tweet and some advice on chowhound. It was Seattle Restaurant Week ($28 for 3 course dinner) when we were there, and normally I wouldn’t do RW too much here in New York, I have no idea what regular food is like, I thought it’d be good to just try three courses. What I later learned after a week in Seattle was that food in Seattle is pretty much just as expensive as New York. If you go to the restaurants that source responsibly and is backed by a chef that’s been nominated for something, then yea… prices are like what you might pay in Brooklyn.
I thought the flavors were clean and focused. Going on a weeknight meant that we skipped the crowds, and we had an early reservation that helped things. At Spur, a lamb dish costs $30 dollars. You figure there’s way less people in Seattle than in New York City, therefore probably more people in NYC willing to pay $30 for lamb. But there we were, in a restaurant that was almost packed on a weeknight. I don’t know how much Restaurant Week had to do with it. But there must be a lot of food lovers in Seattle that are willing to put up with these prices. That, or restaurants in NYC operate on some slim margins.
This was smoked salmon rillete with some creme fraiche on the bottom. It’s almost like lox and cream cheese. I thought this was brilliant, but maybe for folks of the Northwest, this is their version of tuna tartar. That’s the nice thing about visiting another part of the country – everything is so new that it’s almost always interesting enough to be awesome.
Steph had the artichoke salad. It doesn’t look like it contains artichokes, but they’re hiding down there. There was some hardened yogurt on the bottom of that plate and which I thought was odd because you had to scrape it off, but Steph really liked this dish.
And here’s the $30 lamb dish. Bam. Very delicious, and as tasty a lamb dish as you could find in NYC, except it’s in Seattle. I don’t remember what was those little nuggets of green thing, but they were fried and delicious. It’s poor blogger form to not mention what it is, but hey, it’s vacation. I can’t remember every little menu detail. Plus, I have like five more posts on Seattle food!
A few things that I saw repeatedly during our meals in Seattle was fava beans, rhubarb, and ramps. Although ramps didn’t make an appearance in this plate, the other two ingredients did. On both of our plates, we had fava beans in one form or another. And this rhubarb jam went perfectly well with the crispy pork cheeks. Didn’t know pork cheeks could be that delicious, but I’m sure it takes a lot of skill to get them as such.
Finished off the meal with a minty chocolate bar kinda thing. You like how precise I get with that shit, right? Overall, I think Seattle Restaurant Week is kind of a good deal compared to New York. Like NYC though, I think many Seattle restaurants do not like Restaurant Week. In fact, we visited one restaurant that was so anti-RW, that they didn’t participate in the $28 deal, AND had a raffle for winning something for visiting their restaurant during Restaurant Week.
I think the anti-Restaurant Week thing is based on a few things. One, restaurants don’t like it because they end up serving food that’s not representative of what they would normally do. Two, restaurants want people pay sustainable prices because real people work at restaurants. I’m down with that to a certain extent. It’s just kind of hypocritical sometimes because when it comes to electronics, most of us don’t really care if those who made it are making a good wage. There’s no, ‘fair trade’ iphone, is there?
Regardless, Spur was a great first stop on our trip to Seattle. It was a glimpse into the good food that’s available in the Emerald City.
Spur Gastropub113 Blanchard St.Seattle, WA 98121206-728-6706