Thin Wheat Line: Tagliatelle With WTF

Source: Spur, 113 Blanchard St., 728-6706, spurseattle.com.

Price: $14.

You know how, when you've trained your parrot/dog/infant to do the most adorable thing and bragged to your friends about it? Then when they show up for dinner, you trot it/he/she out and make the secret hand gesture -- and it/he/she just wanders away to lick breadcrumbs off the floor? That's how I feel about this pasta.

I've eaten the tagliatelle at Spur a couple times now, forgetting to snap a photo for Thin Wheat Line until it's half-eaten and as photogenic as a bowl of overripe bananas. Despite the wording of the menu, it's a simple enough dish. Gastro-speak translation: Cooking the duck egg sous-vide means vacuum-sealing it in plastic and slowly poaching it at low heat; the chefs can do this with enough precision that the yolk thickens to just the right degree

I love the way you break the orb and it slowly deflates, coating the delicate, fresh pasta in a thick golden custard. It's the only sauce the pasta needs. The sauteed mushrooms, the pine nuts, the rare crunch of green onions, the occasional wisp of Parmesan flavor in the foam (don't hate) -- it's a stunner, rich without leaving your mouth coated in butter.

So the night I bring a bunch of people to Spur in order to try the pasta, it's off -- tossed with so much lemon juice that the mushroom flavor disappeared under all that acidity. Apparently both chefs (Dana Tough and Brian McCracken) were taking the night off that night, and I don't know if the sous merely screwed up the dish or if the chefs have purposefully upped the citrus since I last tried the pasta. Either way, take it back down, guys. I have more people I need to impress with that dish.