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Reviews Revisited: Spring Hill

Everyone’s always raving about Spring Hill, Mark Fuller’s West Seattle hotspot. In fact, Fuller recently became a James Beard semifinalist, nominated for Best Chef in the Northwest. Learn all about his restaurant in this Seattle Met review.

WHEN MARK FULLER WAS HEAD CHEF at the Dahlia Lounge, his boss Eric Tanaka bugged and bugged him to put a particular dish on the menu: Veal sweetbreads with dipping sauces; one sweet, another barbecue, maybe a third like housemade ranch. Yeah, that ranch—Homer Simpson’s salad dressing of choice. At, yes, that Dahlia—big-deal Seattle chef Tom Douglas’s elegant flagship restaurant. “We’ll call it McSweetbreads!” beamed Tanaka. Fuller laughs at the memory and shakes his head. “I just couldn’t do it.”

So to find “crispy veal sweetbreads with three dips” on the starter list of Fuller’s own restaurant, Spring Hill in West Seattle, was an unlikely surprise—yet there they were, between the duck egg yolk raviolo with garlic chips and the apple-wood-smoky rib-eye steak with steak tartare and potato cracklings. And they made a most cerebral comfort food. The sweetbreads contributed their luscious mouthfeel and quiet almost-sweetness, the frying produced a perfect coat, the dips—fireweed honey, coffee barbecue, and, there it was, housemade ranch—delivered cool, satiny counterpoints. Why the chef’s change of heart? Continue reading review….











Kathryn Robinson
Kathryn Robinson
Senior Writer Seattle native Kathryn Robinson, award-winning restaurant critic and senior writer at Seattle Met, has been anonymously reviewing restaurants for over 30 years—first as editor of the Best Places guidebook series, then as staff critic at Seattle Weekly and contributing critic at The Seattle Times and Seattle magazine.  Midcareer she spent a year-long sabbatical studying comparative religion as a Knight Fellow at Stanford University where she had been an undergrad 10 years earlier, gaining a knowledge base she now calls upon for her monthly “Back Fence” column on our collective urban existence and the meaning it holds for our personal lives. In her off hours she is a partner and a parent—which means she has no off hours.