Urban Pasta Party

At Belltown’s newest hot spot the chef is working out the twists in the strozzapretti.

By Kathryn Robinson

There were also main dishes to recommend. A fleshy double-cut pork chop was carefully cooked and fancifully accessorized with spring onions, bits of pancetta, and fiddlehead ferns. At $28, it shamed pricier steakhouse versions. (And it’s one of the spendier items at Tavolata, which provides one of Belltown’s more affordable nights out.) A special of branzino, the trendy whitefish formerly known as Mediterranean sea bass, arrived whole and resplendent on a platter—and made a fluffy, delicate feast with greens and fried potatoes.

It was a brilliant idea to create a casual late-night joint for fresh housemade pasta.

But ironically, in this pasta joint none of our pastas approached the quality of the mains. Stowell’s byword on the pasta is simplicity: simple sauces, minimal embellishments. Strozzapretti (literal translation “priest strangler”—apparently the Italians’ first association with pasta in the shape of a long rolled-up towel), featured the sinister little noodles with chunks of pot roast in a resonant meat sauce. On another plate, rigatoni appeared with Italian sausage in tomato sauce, breathing fresh marjoram so overpowering the whole dish tasted like a sachet. The same preparation on a second visit was better but nowhere near outstanding. And these were the best we tried.

Sometimes the problem was conceptual, as in a touted special in which gnocchi, cauli-flower, and taggiasca olives added up to far less than the sum of these unintegrated parts. A bland dish of agnolotti pasta, stuffed with veal brains, lemon, and ricotta, left one to conclude that this calf wasn’t having very interesting thoughts. A classic spaghetti treatment screaming with anchovies, garlic, and red chili would have been terrific but for the tough spaghetti, miles from the gentle resistance of al dente.

For dessert, the item Mr. Perfect Waiter proffered as doughnut holes disappointed even the kids. “They’re soggy,” the eight-year-olds pronounced of the lemon-flavored zeppole, the sugared nuggets of southern Italy. I had to agree.

When we all dove into our glassy mounds of perfect chocolate sorbetto, it hit me: Tavolata’s trouble is its short-order identity. At Union, Stowell composes works of art for destination diners. At Tavolata he and his crew must choreograph deep fryers and pasta pots for the quick turnarounds of Belltown’s short-attention-span crowd. Maybe that’s why the entrées outshone the pastas: They best reward the kind of concentration Stowell brings to the party.

And Tavolata is a party, an irresistibly fizzy urban party, which makes for one enchanting night out. That it also makes for crazily inconsistent eats is, given the chops of this chef, probably not the last word to be written on Tavolata.


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